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THE AMERICAN 3 3^4' 

SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN EDITION 

VOLUME 34 

THE CHRONICLES 

OF AMERICA SERIES 

ALLEN JOHNSON 

EDITOR 

GERHARD R. LOMER 

CHARLES W. JEFFERYS 

ASSISTANT EDITORS 



THE AxMEiClC^./\N 



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ID UNIVERSITY PRESS 



WALT WHITMAN 

Photograph by George C. Cox, New York. Copyright, 1887, 



THE AMERICAN 
SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

A CHRONICLE OF 

GREAT INTERPRETERS 

BY BLISS PERRY 



LVXET 




NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO. 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1918 






Copyright, 1918, by Yale University Press 



AUG 23 i9i8 



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CONTENTS 

I. THE PIONEERS Page 1 

n. THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE " 25 

m. THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION " 43 

IV. THE REVOLUTION " 66 

V. THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP " 86 

VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS " 109 

Vn. ROMANCE, POETRY. AND HISTORY " 143 

Vin. POE AND WHITMAN " 187 

IX. UNION AND LIBERTY " 206 

X. A NEW NATION " 234 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE " 269 

INDEX " 273 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

WALT WHITMAN 

Photograph by George C. Cox, New York. 
Copyright, 1887. Frontispiece 

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. Marble bust by 

Henry K. Brown. 
EDWARD EVERETT. Plaster cast of bust by 

Clevenger. 
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. After a painting 

by J. W. Jarvis. 
W\\SHINGTON IRVING. After a painting by 

C. R. Leslie. Facing page 90 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Photograph by Black, Boston. " " 116 

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. Engraving 

in the Old State House, Boston. 
HENRY D. THOREAU. From a wood engraving. 
THEODORE PARKER. Engraving by Allen and 

Horton. " " m 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1840. Painting by 
Charles Osgood. In the possession of Mrs. R. C. 
Manning, Salem, Mass. 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1860. Photograph 
from a negative taken by Mayall in London, 
England. In the possession of Mr. Frank Cousins, 
Salem, Mass. " " m 



X ILLUSTRATIONS 

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. Wood en- 
graving from a photograph. 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Photograph. 

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Pho- 
tograph. 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. Wood engrav- 
ing from a photograph. Facing page 160 

GEORGE BANCROFT. Engraving in Bancroft's 
History. 

FRANCIS PARKMAN. Photograph. 

WILLIAM H.PRESCOTT. Engraving by Welch. " " m 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Daguerreotype by Pratt, Richmond, Va., said 
to be Poe's last portrait. In the collection of 
The Players, New York. " 190 

WENDELL PHILLIPS. Photograph by Black, 
Boston. 

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, 1853. After 
the drawing by George Richmond. 

CHARLES SUMNER. Photograph from the col- 
lection of L. C. Handy, Washington. " " SW 

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. Photograph. 
SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, "MARK TWAIN." 

Photograph by Sarony, New York. " " SS8 

GEORGE W. CABLE. Photograph 

BRET HARTE. Photograph. 

SIDNEY LANIER. Photograph. " " 24^ 

HENRY JAMES. Painting by Blanche, exhibited 

in the Salon, Paris. 1909. " " So2 



,c**'' 



THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN 
LITERATURE 



CHAPTER I 

THE PIONEERS 

The United States of America has been from the 
beginning in a perpetual change. The physical and 
mental restlessness of the American and the tem- 
porary nature of many of his arrangements are 
largely due to the experimental character of the 
exploration and development of this continent. 
The new energies released by the settlement of the 
colonies were indeed guided by stern determination, 
wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no one 
has ever really known the outcome of the experi- 
ment. It is a story of faith, of 

Effort, and expectation, and desire, 
And something evermore about to be. 

1 



2 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passion- 
ate force the adoption of the Constitution, without 
any firm conviction as to its permanence. The 
most clear-sighted American of the Civil War peri- 
od recognized this element of uncertainty in our 
American adventure when he declared: "We are 
now testing whether this nation, or any nation so 
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." 
More than fifty years have passed since that war 
reaffirmed the binding force of the Constitution 
and apparently sealed the perpetuity of the Union. 
Yet the gigantic economic and social changes now 
in progress are serving to show that the United 
States has its full share of the anxieties which beset 
all human institutions in this daily altering world. 

"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers 
in a ship, " said Roger Williams. This sense of the 
transiency of human effort, the perishable nature 
of human institutions, was quick in the conscious- 
ness of the gentleman adventurers and sober 
Puritan citizens who emigrated from England to 
the New World. It had been a familiar note in 
the poetry of that Elizabethan period which had 
followed with such breathless interest the explora- 
tion of America. It was a conception which could 
be shared alike by a saint like John Cotton or a 



THE PIONEERS S 

soldier of fortune like John Smith. Men are tent- 
dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow 
they have struck camp and are gone. We are 
strangers and sojourners, as all our fathers were. 

This instinct of the camper has stamped itself 
upon American life and thought. Venturesome- 
ness, physical and moral daring, resourcefulness 
in emergencies, indijfference to negligible details, 
wastefulness of materials, boundless hope and con- 
fidence in the morrow, are characteristics of the 
American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say 
that the "good American" has been he who has 
most resembled a good camper. He has had ro- 
bust health — unless or until he has abused it, — a 
tolerant disposition, and an ability to apply his 
fingers or his brain to many unrelated and unex- 
pected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own trail. 
He has a touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack 
of keeping his tent or his affairs in better order 
than they seem. Above all, he has been ever 
ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to 
wander. He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does 
not build his roads as solidly as the Roman roads 
were built, nor his houses like the English houses, 
it is because he feels that he is here today and gone 
tomorrow. If he has squandered the physical 



4 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

resources of his neighborhood, cutting the forests 
recklessly, exhausting the soil, surrendering water 
power and minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, 
he has done it because he expects, like Voltaire's 
Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden to- 
morrow, built on a nobler plan." When New 
York State grew too crowded for Cooper's Leather- 
Stocking, he shouldered his pack, whistled to his 
dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line for 
the Mississippi. Nothing could be more typical of 
the first three hundred years of American history. 
The traits of the pioneer have thus been the 
characteristic traits of the American in action. 
The memories of successive generations have 
tended to stress these qualities to the neglect of 
others. Everyone who has enjoyed the free life 
of the woods will confess that his own judgment 
upon his casual summer associates turns, quite 
naturally and almost exclusively, upon their 
characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the woods, 
these gentlemen may be more or less admirable 
divines, pedants, men of affairs; but the verdict of 
their companions in the forest is based chiefly upon 
the single question of their adaptability to the 
environment of the camp. Are they quick of eye 
and foot, skillful with rod and gun, cheerful on 



THE PIONEERS 5 

rainy days, ready to do a little more than their 
share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them. 

Some such unconscious selection as this has 
been at work in the classification of our representa- 
tive men. The building of the nation and the liter- 
ary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks 
which have called forth the strength of a great 
variety of individuals. Some of these men have 
proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service, 
irrespective of the question of their general intel- 
lectual powers, or their rank as judged by the 
standard of European performance in the same 
field. Thus the battle of New Orleans, in Euro- 
pean eyes a mere bit of frontier fighting, made 
Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he 
had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him 
the Presidency. 

The analogy holds in literature. Certain ex- 
pressions of American sentiment or conviction 
have served to sununarize or to clarify the spirit 
of the nation. The authors of these productions 
have frequently won the recognition and affection 
of their contemporaries by means of prose and 
verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe 
critical standards. Neither Longfellow's Excel- 
sior nor Poe's Bells nor Whittier's Maud Muller 



6 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

is among the best poems of the three writers in 
question, yet there was something in each of these 
productions which caught the fancy of a whole 
American generation. It expressed one phase of 
the national mind in a given historical period. 

The historian of literature is bound to take ac- 
count of this question of literary vogue, as it is 
highly significant of the temper of successive gen- 
erations in any country. But it is of peculiar 
interest to the student of the literature produced 
in the United States. Is this literature ''Amer- 
ican," or is it "English literature in America," 
as Professor Wendell and other scholars have pre- 
ferred to call it? I should be one of the last to 
minimize the enormous influence of England upon 
the mind and the writing of all the English-speak- 
ing countries of the globe. Yet it will be one of the 
purposes of the present book to indicate the exist- 
ence here, even in colonial times, of a point of view 
differing from that of the mother country, and 
destined to differ increasingly with the lapse of 
time. Since the formation of our Federal Union, 
in particular, the books produced in the United 
States have tended to exhibit certain characteris- 
tics which differentiate them from the books pro- 
duced in other English-speaking countries. We 



THE PIONEERS 7 

must beware, of course, of what the late Charles 
Francis Adams once called the "filiopietistic" fal- 
lacy. The "American" qualities of our literature 
must be judged in connection with its conformity 
to universal standards of excellence. Tested by 
any universal standard. The Scarlet Letter is a 
notable romance. It has won a secure place among 
the literature written by men of English blood 
and speech. Yet to overlook the peculiarly 
local or provincial characteristics of this remark- 
able story is to miss the secret of its inspiration. 
It could have been written only by a New Eng- 
lander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch. 

Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief 
interpreters of the American spirit in literature, 
is a twofold one. We are primarily concerned 
with a procession of men, each of whom is interest- 
ing as an individual and as a writer. But we can- 
not watch the individuals long without perceiving 
the general direction of their march, the ideas that 
animate them, the common hopes and loyalties 
that make up the life of their spirit. To become 
aware of these general tendencies is to under- 
stand the "American" note in our national writing. 

Our historians have taught us that the history of 
the United States is an evolution towards political 



8 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

unity. The separatist, particularist movements 
are gradually thrust to one side. In literary his- 
tory, likewise, we best remember those authors who 
fall into line with what we now perceive to have 
been the course of our literary development. The 
erratic men and women, the "sports" of the great 
experiment, are ultimately neglected by the critics, 
unless, like the leaders of political insurrections, 
those writing men and women have raised a nota- 
ble standard of revolt. No doubt the apparently 
unique literary specimens, if clearly understood 
in their origins and surroundings, would be found 
rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. 
But these laws are not easy to codify and we must 
avoid the temptation to discover, in any particular 
period, more of unity than there actually was. 
And we must always remember that there will be 
beautiful prose and verse unrelated to the main 
national tendencies save as "the literature of es- 
cape. " We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar 
Allan Poe. 

Let us test these principles by applying them to 
the earliest colonists. The first book written on 
the soil of what is now the United States was Cap- 
tain John Smith's True Relation of the planting of 
the Virginia colony in 1607. It was published in 



THE PIONEERS 9 

London in 1608. The Captain was a typical 
Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many 
of his class, for picturesque narrative. In what 
sense, if at all, may his writings on American topics 
be classified as "American*' literary productions? 
It is clear that his experiences in the New World 
were only one phase of the variegated life of this 
English soldier of fortune. But the American 
imagination has persistently claimed him as re- 
presenting something peculiarly ours, namely, a 
kind of pioneer hardihood, resourcefulness, leader- 
ship, which was essential to the exploration and 
conquest of the wilderness. Most of Smith's 
companions were unfitted for the ordeal which he 
survived. They perished miserably in the "starv- 
ing time. " But he was of the stuff from which tri- 
umphant immigrants have ever been made, and it 
is our recognition of the presence of these qualities 
in the Captain which makes us think of his books 
dealing with America as if they were "American 
books." There are other narratives by colonists 
temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations 
which gratify our historical curiosity, but which 
we no more consider a part of American literature 
than the books written by Stevenson, Ejpling, 
and Wells during their casual visits to this country. 



10 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

But Captain Smith's True Relation impresses us, 
like Mark Twain's Roughing It, with being some- 
how true to type. In each of these books the 
possible unveracities in detail are a confirmation of 
their representative American character. 

In other words, we have unconsciously formu- 
lated, in the course of centuries, a general concept 
of "the pioneer. " Novelists, poets, and historians 
have elaborated this conception. Nothing is 
more inevitable than our reaching back to the 
beginning of the seventeenth century and en- 
deavoring to select, among the thousands of 
Englishmen who emigrated or even thought of 
emigrating to this country, those who possessed 
the genuine heart and sinew of the permanent 
settler. 

Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have 
thought of emigrating hither in 1637. If he had 
joined his friends John Cotton and Roger Williams 
in New England, who can doubt that the personal 
characteristics of "my brave Oliver" would today 
be identified with the "American" qualities which 
we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts 
Bay? And what an American settler Cromwell 
would have made! 

If we turn from physical and moral daring to the 



THE PIONEERS 11 

field of theological and political speculation, it is 
easy today to select, among the writings of the 
earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which 
seem to presage the very temper of the late eigh- 
teenth century. Pastor John Robinson's farewell 
address to the Pilgrims at Ley den in 1620 contained 
the famous words: "The Lord has more truth yet 
to break forth out of His holy Word. I cannot 
sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed 
churches, who are come to a period in religion. 
. . . Luther and Calvin were great and shining 
lights in their times, yet they penetrated not into 
the whole counsel of God. " Now John Robinson, 
like Oliver Cromwell, never set foot on American 
soil, but he is identified, none the less, with the 
spirit of American liberalism in religion. 

In political discussion, the early emergence of 
that type of independence familiar to the decade 
1765-75 is equally striking. In a letter written in 
1818, John Adams insisted that "the princi- 
ples and feelings which produced the Revolution 
ought to be traced back for two hundred years, 
and sought in the history of the country from the 
first plantations in America." "I have always 
laughed," he declared in an earlier letter, "at the 
affectation of representing American independence 



12 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, as a late 
invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as 
a probable event, nay as a necessary and unavoid- 
able measure, in case Great Britain should assume 
an unconstitutional authority over us, has been 
familiar to Americans from the first settlement of 
the country." 

There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or 
potential Americanism which existed long before 
the United States came into being. Now that our 
political unity has become a fact, the predisposition 
is certain to be regarded by our own and by future 
generations as evidence of a state of mind which 
made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to 
Thomas Hutchinson, a sound historian and honest 
man, the last Royal Governor of Massachusetts, a 
separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeak- 
able error and calamity. 

The seventeenth-century colonists were pre- 
dominantly English, in blood, in traditions, and in 
impulses. Whether we look at Virginia or Ply- 
mouth or at the other colonies that were planted 
in swift succession along the seaboard, it is clear 
that we are dealing primarily with men of the 
English race. Most of them would have declared, 
with as much emphasis as Francis Hopkinson a 



THE PIONEERS 13 

century later, "We of America are in all respects 
Englishmen. ' * Professor Edward Channing thinks 
that it took a century of exposure to colonial con- 
ditions to force the English in America away from 
the traditions and ideals of those who continued 
to live in the old land. But the student of litera- 
ture must keep constantly in mind that these 
English colonizers represented no single type of the 
national character. There were many men of 
many minds even within the contracted cabin of 
the Mayflower. The "sifted wheat'* was by no 
means all of the same variety. 

For Old England was never more torn by diver- 
gent thought and subversive act than in the period 
between the death of Ehzabeth in 1603 and the 
Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who 
could say what was really "English".'* Was it 
James the First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or 
John Cotton.? Charles the First or Cromwell? 
Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it 
Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separa- 
tist, Quaker? One is tempted to say that the 
title of Ben Jonson's comedy Every Man in his 
Humour became the standard of action for two 
whole generations of Englishmen, and that there is 
no common denominator for emigrants of such 



14 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, 
Morton of Merry mount, John Winthrop, "Sir" 
Christopher Gardiner and Anne Hutchinson of 
Boston, and Roger WiUiams of Providence. They 
seem as miscellaneous as "Kitchener's Army." 

It is true that we can make certain distinctions. 
Virginia, as has often been said, was more like a 
continuation of English society, while New Eng- 
land represented a digression from English society. 
There were then, as now, "stand-patters" and 
"progressives." It was the second class who, 
while retaining very conservative notions about 
property, developed a fearless intellectual radical- 
ism which has written itself into the history of the 
United States. But to the student of early Amer- 
ican literature all such generalizations are of 
limited value. He is dealing with individual men, 
not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. 
He has learned from recent historians to distrust 
any such facile classification of the first colonists. 
He knows by this time that there were aristocrats 
in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; 
that the Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant 
than the Puritans of Boston, and that Rhode Island 
was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as 
these general statements may be, the interpreter 



THE PIONEERS 15 

of men of letters must always go back of the racial 
type or the social system to the individual person. 
He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of 
creative evolution which holds that in the ascend- 
ing progress of the race each thinking person be- 
comes a species by himself. 

While something is gained, then, by remember- 
ing that the racial instincts and traditions of 
the first colonists were overwhelmingly English, 
and that their political and ethical views were 
the product of a turbulent and distraught time, 
it is even more important to note how the phy- 
sical situation of the colonists affected their 
intellectual and moral, as well as their po- 
htical problems. Among the emigrants from 
England, as we have seen, there were great varieties 
of social status, religious opinion, individual mo- 
tive. But at least they all possessed the physical 
courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous 
voyage, the fearful hardships, and the vast uncer- 
tainties of the new life. To go out at all, under the 
pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly 
a searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," 
and though a few picturesque rascals had the cour- 
age to go into exile while a few saints may have 
been deterred, it is a truism to say that the 



16 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

pioneers were made up of brave men and braver 
women. 

It cannot be asserted that their courage was the 
result of any single, dominating motive, equally 
operative in all of the colonies. Mrs. Hemans's 
familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship 
God" was measurably true of the Pilgrims of 
Plymouth, about whom she was writing. But the 
far more important Puritan emigration to Massa- 
chusetts under Winthrop aimed not so much at 
"freedom" as at the establishment of a theocracy 
according to the Scriptures. These men straight- 
way denied freedom of worship, not only to new- 
comers who sought to join them, but to those 
members of their own company who developed 
independent ways of thinking. The list of motives 
for emigration ran the whole gamut, from mission- 
ary fervor for converting the savages, down 
through a commendable desire for gain, to the 
perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a 
debtor's prison or the pillory. A few of the colo- 
nists were rich. Some were beggars or indentured 
servants. Most of them belonged to the middle 
class. John Harvard was the son of a butcher; 
Thomas Shepard, the son of a grocer; Roger 
Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were 



THE PIONEERS 17 

university bred and were natural leaders of 
men. 

Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life 
common to all of the colonists began instantly to 
exert its slow, irresistible pressure upon their 
minds and to mould them into certain ways of 
thinking and feeling. Without some perception of 
these modes of thought and emotion a knowledge 
of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, 
for instance, the mere physical situation of the 
first colonists, encamped on the very beach of the 
wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their rear. 
Their provisions were scanty. They grew watch- 
ful of the strange soil, of the new skies, of the un- 
known climate. Even upon the voyage over, 
John Winthrop thought that "the declination of 
the pole star was much, even to the view, beneath 
that it is in England," and that "the new moon, 
when it first appeared, was much smaller than at 
any time he had seen it in England. '* Here was a 
man evidently using his eyes with a new interest 
in natural phenomena. Under these changed 
skies the mind began gradually to change also. 

At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost 
of Europe, a forlorn hope of the Protestant Reform- 
ation. "We shall be as a city upon a hill,*' said 



18 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." 
Their creed was Calvinism, then in its third gen- 
eration of dominion and a European doctrine which 
was not merely theological but social and political. 
The emigrant Englishmen were soon to discover 
that it contained a doctrine of human rights based 
upon human needs. At the beginning of their 
novel experience they were doubtless unaware of 
any alteration in their theories. But they were 
facing a new situation, and that new situation be- 
came an immense factor in their unconscious 
growth. Their intellectual and moral problems 
shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind 
blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton 
preaching in a shed in the new Boston had come to 
"suffer a sea-change" from the John Cotton who 
had been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church 
in Lincolnshire. The "church without a bishop" 
and the "state without a king" became a different 
church and state from the old, however loyally the 
ancient forms and phrases were retained. 

If the political problems of equality which were 
latent in Calvinism now began to take on a differ- 
ent meaning under the democratic conditions of 
pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that 
amazing creed were intensified. "Fallen" human 



THE PIONEERS 19 

nature remained the same, whether in the crowded 
cosmopoHtan streets of Holland and London, or 
upon the desolate shores of Cape Cod. But the 
moral strain of the old insoluble conflict between 
"fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the 
physical loneliness of the colonists. Each soul 
must fight its own unaided, unending battle. In 
that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of 
the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of 
a later epoch, many a mind snapped. Unnatural 
tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes. But 
for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism 
became a potent spiritual gymnastic, where, as in 
the Swedish system of bodily training, one lifts 
imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imagi- 
nary and ever-increasing effort, flexor and ex- 
tensor muscles pulling against one another, driven 
by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as 
maniacs. 

The new situation, again, turned many of the 
theoretical speculations of the colonists into prac- 
tical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian. 
Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, 
if so, had he partaken of the sin of Adam? These 
questions perplexed the saintly Eliot and the 
generous Roger Williams. But before many 



20 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

years the query as to whether a Pequot warrior 
had a soul became suddenly less important than 
the practical question as to whether the Pequot 
should be allowed any further chances of taking 
the white man's scalp. On this last issue the 
colonists were unanimous in the negative. 

It would be easy to multiply such instances of a 
gradual change of view. But beneath all the 
changes and all the varieties of individual behavior 
in the various colonies that began to dot the sea- 
board, certain qualities demanded by the new sur- 
roundings are felt in colonial life and in colonial 
writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or 
at least that degree of order essential to the exist- 
ence of a camp. It was not in vain that John 
Smith sought to correct the early laxness at James- 
town by the stern edict: "He that will not work, 
neither shall he eat. *' Dutch and Quaker colonies 
taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. 
Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, 
but the lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's 
Poor Richard mottoes their flavor of homely, ex- 
perienced truth. 

Order in daily life led straight to political order, 
just as the equality and resourcefulness of the 
frontier, stimulated by isolation from Europe, led 



THE PIONEERS 21 

to poKtical independence. The pioneer learned 
to make things for himself instead of sending to 
London for them, and by and by he grew as im- 
patient of waiting for a political edict from London 
as he would become in waiting for a London plough. 
"This year," wrote one colonist, "ye will go to 
complain to the Parliament, and the next year they 
will send to see how it is, and the third year the 
government is changed." The time was coming 
when no more complaints would be sent. 

One of the most startling instances of this 
colonial instinct for self-government is the case of 
Thomas Hooker. Trained in Emmanuel College 
of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cam- 
bridge in 1633. He grew restless under its theo- 
cratic government, being, it was said, "a person 
who when he was doing his Master's work would 
put a king into his pocket. " So he led the famous 
migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to Hartford, 
and there helped to create a federation of inde- 
pendent towns which made their own constitution 
without mentioning any king, and became one of 
the corner-stones of American democracy. In 
May, 1638, Hooker declared in a sermon before 
the General Court "that the choice of public 
magistrates belongs unto the people by God*s 



22 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

own allowance,*' and "that they who have the 
power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in 
their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations 
of the power and place into which they call them.'* 
The reason of this is: "Because the foundation 
of authority is laid, firstly ^ in the free consent of 
the people.'* This high discourse antedates the 
famous pamphlets on liberty by Milton. It is a 
half-century earlier than Locke's Treatise on 
Government, a century and a quarter earlier than 
Rousseau's Control Social, and it precedes by one 
hundred and thirty-eight years the American 
Declaration of Independence. 

But the slightest acquaintance with colonial 
writings will reveal the fact that such political 
radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was accompanied 
by an equally striking conservatism in other direc- 
tions. One of these conservative traits was the 
pioneer's respect for property, and particularly 
for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone 
once spoke of possession of the soil as the most 
important and most operative of all social facts. 
Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was 
disinclined to part with his land without a sub- 
stantial price for it. The land at his disposal was 
practically illimitable, but he showed a very 



THE PIONEERS 23 

English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his 
own portion. 

Very English, likewise, was his attachment to 
the old country as "home." The lighter and the 
more serious writings of the colonists are alike in 
their respect for the past. In the New England 
settlements, although not at first in Virginia, 
there was respect for learning and for an educated 
clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They 
maintained a stubborn regard for the Common 
Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of 
a successful rebellion from the mother country, this 
Common Law still held the Americans to the ex- 
perience of the inescapable past. 

Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from 
the pages of the books written in America during 
the seventeenth century, and tries to meditate 
upon the general difference between them and the 
English books written during the same period, he 
will be aware of the firmness with which the con- 
servative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. 
It was only one hundred years from the Great 
Armada of 1588 to the flight of James Second, the 
last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution 
of 1688 the struggles characteristic of the seven- 
teenth century in England came to an end. A new 



24 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

working basis is found for thought, poKtics, soci- 
ety, literature. But while those vast changes had 
been shaking England, two generations of Amer- 
ican colonists had cleared their forests, fought the 
savages, organized their townships and their trade, 
put money in their purses, and lived, though as yet 
hardly suspecting it, a life that was beginning to 
differentiate them from the men of the Old World. 
We must now glance at the various aspects of this 
isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in their books. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 

The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings 
is made up of records of exploration and adventure. 
They are like the letters written from California in 
1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to 
home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they 
describe the new world, explain the present situa- 
tion of the colonists, and express their hopes for 
the future. Captain John Smith's True Relation^ 
already alluded to, is the typical production of this 
class: a swift marching book, full of eager energy, 
of bluff and breezy picturesqueness, and of trium- 
phant instinct for the main chance. Like most of 
the Elizabethans, he cannot help poetizing in his 
prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport"; "and 
what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, 
and lesse hurt or charge then angling with a hooke, 
and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, 
over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the 

25 



26 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

gallant Captain is also capable of very plain speech, 
Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes 
back to the London stockholders of the Virginia 
Company: "When you send again, I entreat you 
rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, 
gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and 
diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a 
thousand of such as we have." 

America was but an episode in the wide wander- 
ings of Captain Smith, but he owes his place in 
human memory today to the physical and mental 
energy with which he met the demands of a new 
situation, and to the vividness with which he 
dashed down in words whatever his eyes had seen. 
Whether, in that agreeable passage about Poca- 
hontas, he was guilty of romancing a little, no one 
really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of 
this peculiarly American type of story, will con- 
tinue to have an indulgent audience. 

But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the 
pen. William Strachey's True Reportory of the 
Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt, vpon and from the 
islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given 
a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in The 
Tempest. In either case it is admirable writing, 
flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 27 

the apostle of Virginia, mingles, like many a mis- 
sionary of the present day, the style of an exhorter 
with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage 
mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, 
tells in a language as simple as Defoe's the piteous 
tale of five months of illness and starvation, 
watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans. " John 
Pory, of "the strong potations," who thinks that 
"good company is the soul of this life," neverthe- 
less comforts himself in his solitude among the 
"crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting 
that he is escaping envy and expense. George 
Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during 
a Virginia exile in continuing his translation of 
Ovid's Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an ad- 
venturer who belongs to a somewhat later day, 
since he speaks of having "read Mr. Smith's 
travels, " draws the long bow of narrative quite as 
powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, and far more 
smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on 
shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel 
is an artist who would have delighted Stevenson. 

All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were 
Englishmen, and most of them returned to Eng- 
land, where their books were printed and their 
remaining lives were passed. But far to the north- 



28 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

east of Virginia there were two colonies of men who 
earned the right to say, in William Bradford's 
quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, 
whom small things can discourage, or small dis- 
contentments cause to wish themselves at home 
again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Ply- 
mouth, headed by Bradford himself. The other 
was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, 
with John Winthrop as governor. 

Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which 
are more than chronicles of adventure. They 
record the growth and government of a com- 
monwealth. Both Bradford and Winthrop were 
natural leaders of men, grave, dignified, solid, en- 
dowed with a spirit that bred confidence. Each 
was learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of 
property, had a higher social standing than Brad- 
ford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's 
flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the May- 
flower and the well-to-do Puritan of the Bay Colony 
both wrote their annals like gentlemen and schol- 
ars. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation 
runs from 1620 to 1647. Winthrop's diary, now 
printed as the History of New England, begins 
with his voyage in 1630 and closes in the year of 
his death, 1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 29 

experiment in self-government under pioneer con- 
ditions these books are priceless; as human docu- 
ments, they illuminate the Puritan character; as 
for "Hterary" value in the narrow sense of that 
word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to 
have thought of Hterary effect. Yet the leader of 
the Pilgrims has passages of grave sweetness and 
charm, and his sketch of his associate. Elder 
Brewster, will bear comparison with the best 
English biographical writing of that century. 
Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is 
in matter, but he writes throughout as a ruler of 
men should write, with "decent plainness and 
manly freedom." His best known pages, justly 
praised by Tyler and other historians of American 
thought, contain his speech before the General 
Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No 
paragraphs written in America previous to the 
Revolution would have given more pleasure to 
Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that Lin- 
coln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though 
his own ancestor, Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, 
lived under Winthrop's jurisdiction. 

The theory of government held by the dominant 
party of the first two generations of New England 
pioneers has often been called a "theocracy," 



30 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

that is to say, a government according to the Word 
of God as expounded and enforced by the clergy. 
The experiment was doomed to ultimate failure, 
for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts 
of human nature. But its administration was in 
the hands of able men. The power of the clergy 
was well-nigh absolute. The political organiza- 
tion of the township depended upon the ecclesias- 
tical organization as long as the right to vote was 
confined to church members. How sacrosanct 
and awful was the position of the clergyman may 
be perceived from Hawthorne's The Minister's 
Black Veil and The Scarlet Letter. 

Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and 
Cotton, Shepard and Norton, had every instinct 
and capacity for leadership. With the notable 
exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, 
holding John Winthrop's opinion that "Democracy 
is, among most civil nations, accounted the mean- 
est and worst form of government." They were 
fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for the 
Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford 
in 1636 — the very year of the founding of Harvard 
— was prudently withheld, but it is now thought 
to be the instinct of escape from the clerical ar- 
chitects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 31 

would today call Thomas Hooker a liberal in re- 
ligion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved 
to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke 
of a great hammer, smiting at the mind and heart. 
"Others because they have felt the heavy hand 
of God . . . upon these grounds they build their 
hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope 
to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the 
worst is over.'" Not so, thunders the preacher 
in repl}^: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in 
brimstone and they shall burn in hell." One of 
Hooker's successors has called him "a son of 
thunder and a son of consolation by turns. " The 
same may be said of Thomas Shepard, another 
graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cam- 
bridge, who became the "soul-melting preacher" 
of the newer Cambridge by the Charles. Pure, 
ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing 
themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. 
He thinks "the truth is a poor mean thing in itself" 
and that the human reason cannot be "the last 
resolution of all doubts," which must be sought 
only in the written Word of God. He holds it " a 
tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved. " 
"Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger. " Yet, 
like so many mystics, he yearns to be "covered 



32 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

with God, as with a cloud," to be "drowned, 
plunged, and swallowed up with God." One 
hundred years later we shall find this same rhap- 
sodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan 
Edwards. 

John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the 
early Colonial pulpit, owes his fame more to his 
social and political influence than to his literary 
power. Yet even that was thought commanding. 
Trained, like Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel 
College, and fresh from the rectorship of St. 
Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton 
dominated that new Boston which was named in 
his honor. He became the Pope of the theocracy; 
a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems 
to have shared some of the opinions of Anne 
Hutchinson, though he "pronounced the sentence 
of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with 
much zeal and detestation of her errors. Haw- 
thorne, in one of his ironic moods, might have 
done justice to this scene. Cotton was at heart 
too liberal for his role of Primate, and fate led him 
to persecute a man whose very name has become 
a symbol of victorious tolerance, Roger Williams. 

Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, 
Milton, and Sir Harry Vane, had been exiled from 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 33 

Massachusetts for maintaining that the civil power 
had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doc- 
trine was fatal to the existence of a theocratic state 
dominated by the church. John Cotton was per- 
fectly logical in "enlarging" Roger Williams into 
the wilderness, but he showed less than his usual 
discretion in attacking the quick-tempered Welsh- 
man hi pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if 
he would kiudly consent to fight. Back and forth 
the books fly, for Williams loves this game. His 
Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience 
calls forth Mr. Cotton's Bloody Tenet washed and 
made white in the Blood of the Lamb; and this in 
turn provokes the torrential flood of Williams's 
masterpiece. The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by 
Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in the Blood 
of the Lamb. There is glorious writing here, and 
its effect cannot be suggested by quoting sentences. 
But there is one sentence in a letter written by 
WUliams in his old age to his fellow-townsmen of 
Providence which points the whole moral of the 
terrible mistake made by the men who sought 
spiritual liberty in America for themselves, only 
to deny that same liberty to others. *'I have only 
one motion and petition, " begs this veteran pioneer 
who had forded many a swollen stream and built 



34 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

many a rude bridge in the Plantations: "it is this, 
that after you have got over the black brook of 
some soul bondage yourselves, you tear not down 
the bridge after you. " 

It is for such wise and humane counsels as this 
that Roger Williams is remembered. His op- 
ponents had mightier intellects than his, but the 
world has long since decided against them. Co- 
lonial sermon literature is read today chiefly by 
antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed 
which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the 
theology of Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy, 
has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. But 
we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect 
of this pulpit literature without remembering the 
passionate faith that made pulpit and pews co- 
partners in a supreme spiritual struggle. His- 
torians properly insist upon the aesthetic poverty 
of the New England Puritans; that their rule of 
life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dra- 
matic literature of their race, then just closing its 
most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry 
or music and no architecture and plastic art. But 
we must never forget that to men of their creed 
the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures'* 
served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 35 

outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual 
leaders were the very stuff of human passion in 
its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing 
hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption 
with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages 
of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensi- 
tive to the beauty of words and the sweep of 
emotions as our contemporaries upon whose 
book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread. 

It is only by entering into the psychology of the 
period that we can estimate its attitude towards 
the poetry written by the pioneers themselves. 
The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed 
in the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement 
of the magnificent King James Version of the 
Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of 
the New England churches could sing more than 
half-a-dozen tunes, and a pitch-pipe was for a long 
time the only musical instrument allowed. Judged 
as hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm Booh 
provokes a smile. But the men and women who 
used it as a handbook of devotion sang it with their 
hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seven- 
teenth-century poem as Wigglesworth's Day of 
Doom one must strip oneself quite free from the 
twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the 



36 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

chimney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading 
aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell once 
humorously suggested, may have added a "live- 
lier relish" to the poet's "premonitions of eternal 
combustion. " Lowell could afford to laugh about 
it, having crossed that particular black brook. 
But for several generations the boys and girls of 
New England had read the Day of Doom as if 
Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat 
sickly minister of Maiden, had veritably peeped 
into Hell. It is the present fashion to under- 
estimate the power of Wigglesworth's verse. At 
its best it has a trampling, clattering shock like a 
charge of cavalry and a sound like clanging steel. 
Mr. Kipling and other cunning ballad-makers 
have imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen 
by the nervous little parson. But no living poet 
can move his readers to the fascinated horror once 
felt by the Puritans as they followed Wiggles- 
worth's relentless gaze into the future of the soul's 
destiny. 

Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, 
over other verse-writers of the period. Anne 
Bradstreet's poems, for instance, are not without 
grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their 
didactic themes and portentous length. But this 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 37 

lady, born in England, the daughter of Governor 
Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, 
chose to imitate the more fantastic of the moraliz- 
ing poets of England and France. There is little 
in her hundreds of pages which seems today the 
inevitable outcome of her own experience in the 
New World. For readers who like roughly mis- 
chievous satire, of a type initiated in England by 
Bishop Hall and Donne, there is The Simple 
Cobbler of Agawam written by the roving clergy- 
man Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a dozen 
years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures 
are scarcely more "American" than the satire 
upon German professors in Sartor Resartus is 
"German." Like Charles Dickens's American 
Notes, Ward's give the reaction of a born English- 
man in the presence of the sights and the talk and 
the personages of the transatlantic world. 

Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth 
century, those that have lost least of their interest 
through the lapse of years are narratives of strug- 
gles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody 
savage" has always hovered in the background of 
the American imagination. Our boys and girls have 
"played Lidian" from the beginning, and the actual 
Indian is still found, as for three hundred years past. 



38 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

upon the frontier fringe of our civilization. Nov- 
elists like Cooper, historians like Parkman, poets 
like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material 
offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long 
series begins with the scribbled story of colonists. 
Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of 
trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; 
then the inevitable alienation of the two races and 
the doom of the native. 

The "noble savage" note may be found in John 
Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, 
poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled 
and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, 
Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic ob- 
servation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan 
zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, how- 
ever, these "naked slaves of the devil" were "not 
so simple as some have supposed." He yearned 
and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot 
and Roger Williams and Daniel Gookin of New 
England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim 
settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, 
and the narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and 
Captain John Mason, who led in the storming 
and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as 
piously relentless as anything in the Old Testa- 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 39 

ment. Cromwell at Drogheda, not long after, had 
soldiers no more merciless than these extermina- 
ting Puritans, who wished to plough their fields 
henceforth in peace. A generation later the storm 
broke again in Eang Philip's War. Its tales of 
massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting 
linger in the American imagination still. Typical 
pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale 
of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent 
captivity, and the loud-voiced Captain Church's 
unvarnished description of King Philip's death. 
The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in 
the deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud 
and water, with his gun under him." They 
"drew him through the mud to the upland; and 
a doleful, great, naked dirty beast he looked like. " 
The head brought only thirty shillings at Ply- 
mouth: "scanty reward and poor encouragement, " 
thought Captain Church. William Hubbard, 
the minister of Ipswich, wrote a comprehensive 
Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New 
England, bringing the history down to 1677. 
Under the better known title of Indian Wars, this 
fervid and dramatic tale, penned ia a quiet par- 
sonage, has stirred the pulses of every succeeding 
generation. 



40 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

The close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding 
as it does with Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, marks 
an era in the development of our independent life. 
The events of that year, in the words of Professor 
Tyler, "established two very considerable facts, 
namely, that English colonists in America could 
be so provoked as to make physical resistance to 
the authority of England, and, second, that English 
colonists in America could, in the last resort, put 
down any combination of Indians that might be 
formed against them. In other words, it was then 
made evident that English colonists would cer- 
tainly be safe in the new world, and also that they 
would not always be colonists. " 

While the end of an historical or literary era 
cannot always be thus conveniently indicated by a 
date, there is no doubt that the final quarter of the 
seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the 
outward life and the inner temper of the colonists. 
The "first fine careless rapture" was over. Only 
a few aged men could recall the memory of the 
first settlements. Between the founding of James- 
town and the rebellion under the leadership of 
Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had inter- 
vened, an interval corresponding to that which 
separates us from the Mexican War. Roger Wil- 



THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE 41 

Hams ended his much-enduring and beneficent 
hfe in the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. 
He had already outHved Cotton and Hooker, 
Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty years. 
Inevitably men began, toward the end of the cen- 
tury, to take stock of the great venture of coloniza- 
tion, to scrutinize their own history and present 
position, to ask searching questions of themselves. 
"You have better food and raiment than was in 
former times," wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; 
"but have you better hearts than your forefathers 
had?" Thomas Walley's Languishing Common- 
wealth maintains that "Faith is dead, and Love is 
cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's election 
sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of 
the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This 
period of critical inquiry and assessment, however, 
also gives grounds for just pride. History, bi- 
ography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is 
reminded of that epoch, one hundred and fifty 
years later, when the deaths of John Adams and 
of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anni- 
versary day, the Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all 
Americans to a fresh recognition of the services 
wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was 
in the colonies at the close of the seventeenth cen- 



42 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

tury. Old England, in one final paroxysm of 
political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. 
That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close 
of a long and tragic struggle which began in the 
autocratic theories of James the First and in the 
absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of 
that momentous conflict had its reverberation 
across the Atlantic, as the history of the granting 
and withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses 
abundantly. The American pioneers were quite 
aware of what was going on in England, and they 
praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the 
results or quietly nullified them, as the case might 
be. But all the time, while England was rocked to 
its foundations, the colonists struck steadily for- 
ward into their own independent life. 



CHAPTER III 

THE THIRD AND FOUBTH GENERATION 

When the eighteenth century opened, many signs 
of change were in the air. The third generation 
of native-born Americans was becoming secular- 
ized. The theocracy of New England had failed. 
In the height of the tragic folly over the supposed 
*' witchcraft" in Salem, Increase Mather and his 
son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in 
their implacable work. But before five years had 
passed, Judge Sewall does public penance in church 
for his share of the awful blunder, desiring "to 
take the shame and blame of it. " Robert Calef 's 
cool pamphlet exposing the weakness of the prose- 
cutors' case is indeed burned by Increase Mather in 
the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to 
force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse 
that office to his son. In the town of Boston, once 
hermetically sealed against heresy, there are 
Baptist and Episcopal churches — and a dancing- 

43 



44 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

master. Young Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, 
professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he 
does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying 
day," and neither the clerical nor the secular arm 
of Boston is long enough and strong enough to 
compel that industrious apprentice into piety. 
If such was the state of New England, the laxity 
of New York and Virginia needs little evidence. 
Contemporary travelers found the New Yorkers 
singularly attached to the things of this present 
world. Philadelphia was prosperous and there- 
with content. Virginia was a paradise with no 
forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 
1724, considers North Carolina "the refuge of 
runaways," and South Carolina "the delight of 
buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy 
retreat of true Britons and true Churchmen." 
Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished "by 
the plenty of the country," have "contemptible 
notions of England!" We shall hear from them 
again. In the meantime the witty William Byrd 
of Westover describes for us his amusing survey 
of the Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into 
North Carolina and to Governor Spotswood's iron 
mines, where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, 
on a rainy autumn day, three acts of the Beggars* 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 45 

Opera, just over from London. So runs the world 
away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray pamts 
it once for all, no doubt, in the opening chapters of 
The Virginians. 

To discover any ambitious literary effort in this 
period, we must turn northward again. In the 
middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia, 
which had now outgrown Boston in population, 
there was a quickened interest in education and 
science. But the New Englanders were still the 
chief makers of books. Three great names will 
sufficiently represent the age: Cotton Mather, a 
prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly 
to the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps 
the most consummate intellect of the eighteenth 
century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the 
most perfect exponent of its many-sided life. 

When Cotton Mather was graduated from Har- 
vard in 1678, in his sixteenth year, he was publicly 
complimented by President Cakes, in fulsome 
Latin, as the grandson of Richard Mather and 
John Cotton. This atmosphere of flattery, this 
consciousness of continuing in his own person the 
famous local dynasty, surrounded and sustained 
him to the end. He had a less commanding per- 
sonality than his father Increase. His nervous sen- 



46 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

sibility was excessive. His natural vanity was never 
subdued, though it was often chastened by trial 
and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, 
he was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer 
of books, carrying daily such burdens of mental 
and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a 
normal man. Increase Mather published some 
one hundred and fifty books and pamphlets: 
Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The 
Rev. John Norton, in his sketch of John Cotton, 
remarks that "the hen, which brings not forth 
without uncessant sitting night and day, is an apt 
emblem of students." Certainly the hen is an 
apt emblem of the "uncessant" sitter, the credu- 
lous scratcher, the fussy cackler who produced the 
Magnalia. 

Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His 
tribal loyalty was perfect. His ascetic devotion 
to his conception of religious truth was absolute. 
His Diary, which has recently been published in 
full, records his concern for the chief political events 
in Europe in his day, no less than his brooding 
solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and 
his agony of spirit over the lapses of his wayward 
eldest son. A "sincere" man, then, as Carlyle 
would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 47 
"Jewish old clothes," such professional robings 
and personal plumage as makes it difficult, save 
in the revealing Diary, to see the man himself. 
The Magnalia Christi Americana, treating the 
history of New England from 1620 to 1698, was 
published in a tall London folio of nearly 800 
pages in 1702. It is divided into seven books, 
and proceeds, by methods entirely unique, to tell 
of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors, of 
Harvard College, of the churches of New Eng- 
land, of marvelous events, of Indian wars; and in 
general to justify, as only a member of the Mather 
dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston 
men. Hawthorne and Whittier, Longfellow and 
Lowell knew this book well and found much honey 
in the vast carcass. To have had four such 
readers and a biographer like Barrett Wendell 
must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in Paradise. 
The Diary of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge 
Samuel Sewall has been read more generally in 
recent years than anything written by Mather 
himself. It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier 
than the first entry in Mather's Diary, and it ends 
in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724. As a 
picture of everyday happenings in New England, 
Sewall's Diary is as far superior to Mather's as 



48 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Pepys's Diary is to George Fox's Journal in 
painting the England of tlie Restoration. Samuel 
Sewall was an admirably solid figure, keen, forceful, 
honest. Most readers of his Diary believe that he 
really was in luck when he was rejected by the 
Widow Winthrop on that fateful November day 
when his eye noted — in spite of his infatuation — 
that "her dress was not so clean as sometime it 
had been. Jehovah Jireh!" 

One pictures Cotton Mather as looking instinc- 
tively backward to the Heroic Age of New England 
with pious nervous exaltation, and Samuel Sewall 
as doing the day's work uprightly without taking 
anxious thought of either past or future. But 
Jonathan Edwards is set apart from these and 
other men. He is a lonely seeker after spiritual 
perfection, in quest of that city "far on the world's 
rim," as Masefield says of it, the city whose 
builder and maker is God. 

The story of Edwards's career has the simplicity 
and dignity of tragedy. Born in a parsonage in 
the quiet Connecticut valley in 1703 — the year of 
John Wesley's birth—he is writing at the age 
of ten to disprove the doctrine of the materiality 
of the soul. At twelve he is studying "the 
wondrous way of the working of the spider," with a 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 49 

precision and enthusiasm which would have made 
him a great naturahst. At fourteen he begins 
his notes on The Mind and on Natural Science. 
He is graduated from Yale in 1720, studies the- 
ology, and at twenty-four becomes the colleague of 
his famous grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the 
church at Northampton. He marries the beauti- 
ful Sarah Pierrepont, whom he describes in his 
journal in a prose rhapsody which, like his mysti- 
cal rhapsodies on religion in the same youthful 
period, glows with a clear unearthly beauty 
unmatched in any English prose of that century. 
For twenty- three years he serves the Northampton 
church, and his sermons win him the rank of the 
foremost preacher in New England. John Wesley 
reads at Oxford his account of the great revival of 
1735. "Whitefield comes to visit him at North- 
ampton. Then, in 1750, the ascetic preacher 
alienates his church over issues pertaining to disci- 
pline and to the administration of the sacrament. 
He is dismissed. He preaches his "farewell ser- 
mon," like Wesley, like Emerson, like Newman, 
and many another still unborn. He removes to 
Stockbridge, then a hamlet in the wilderness, 
preaches to the Indians, and writes treatises on 
theology and metaphysics, among them the world- 



50 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

famous Freedom of the Will. In 1757, upon the 
death of his son-in-law. President Aaron Burr of 
Princeton, Edwards is called to the vacant Presi- 
dency. He is reluctant to go, for though he is only 
fifty-four, his health has never been robust, and he 
has his great book on the History of Redemption 
still to write. But he accepts, finds the small- 
pox raging in Princeton upon his arrival in Janu- 
ary, 1758, is inoculated, and dies of the disease in 
March — his dreams unfulfilled, his life-work once 
more thwarted. Close by the tomb of this saint is 
the tomb of his grandson, Aaron Burr, who killed 
Hamilton. 

The literary reputation of Jonathan Edwards 
has turned, like the vicissitudes of his life, upon 
factors that could not be foreseen. His contem- 
porary fame was chiefly as a preacher, and was due 
to sermons like those upon God Glorified in Man's 
Dependence and The Reality of Spiritual Life, 
rather than to such discourses as the Enfield ser- 
mon. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 
which in our own day is the best known of his deliv- 
erances. Legends have grown up around this ter- 
rific Enfield sermon. Its fearful power over its 
immediate hearers cannot be gainsaid, and it will 
long continue to be quoted as an example of the 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 51 

length to which a Calvinistic logician of genius was 
compelled by his own scheme to go. We still see 
the tall, sweet-faced man, worn by his daily twelve 
hours of intense mental toil, leaning on one elbow 
in the pulpit and reading from manuscript, without 
even raising his gentle voice, those words which 
smote his congregation into spasms of terror and 
which seem to us sheer blasphemy. 

Yet the Farewell Sermon of 1750 gives a more 
characteristic view of Edwards's mind and heart, 
and conveys an ineffaceable impression of his 
nobility of soul. His diction, like Wordsworth's, 
is usually plain almost to bareness; the formal 
framework of his discourses is obtruded; and he 
hunts objections to their last hiding-place with 
wearisome pertinacity. Yet his logic is incandes- 
cent. Steel sometimes bums to the touch like 
this, in the bitter winters of New England, and one 
wonders whether Edwards's brain was not of ice, 
so pitUess does it seem. His treatise denying the 
freedom of the will has given him a European 
reputation comparable with that enjoyed by 
Franklin in science and Jefferson in political 
propaganda. It was really a polemic demon- 
strating the sovereignty of God, rather than pure 
theology or metaphysics. Edwards goes beyond 



52 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Augustine and Calvin in asserting the arbitrary 
will of the Most High and in "denying to the 
human will any self -determining power. " He has 
been refuted by events and tendencies, such as the 
growth of historical criticism and the widespread 
acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, rather than 
by the might of any single antagonist. So, too, 
the Dred Scott decision of Chief Justice Taney, 
holding that the slave was not a citizen, was not so 
much answered by opponents as it was superseded 
by the arbitrament of war. But the ideaHsm of 
this lonely thinker has entered deeply and perma- 
nently into the spiritual life of his countrymen, 
and he will continue to be read by a few of those 
who still read Plato and Dante. 

"My mother grieves," wrote Benjamin Franklin 
to his father in 1738, "that one of her sons is an 
Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian 
or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know. 
The truth is I make such distinctions very little 
my study." To understand Franklin's indiffer- 
ence to such distinctions, we must realize how com- 
pletely he represents the secularizing tendencies 
of his age. What a drama of worldly adven- 
ture it all was, this roving life of the tallow-chand- 
ler's son, who runs away from home, walks the 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 53 

streets of Philadelphia with the famous loaves of 
bread under his arm, is diligent in business, slips 
over to London, where he gives lessons in swim- 
ming and in total abstinence, slips back to Phila- 
delphia and becomes its leading citizen, fights the 
long battle of the American colonies in London, 
sits in the Continental Congress, sails to Europe 
to arrange that French Alliance which brought our 
Revolution to a successful issue, and comes home 
at last, full of years and honors, to a bland and 
philosophical exit from the stage! 

He broke with every Puritan tradition. The 
Franklins were relatively late comers to New 
England. They sprang from a long line of black- 
smiths at Ecton in Northamptonshire. The seat 
of the Washirigtons was not far away, and Frank- 
lin's latest biographer points out that the pink- 
coated huntsmen of the Washington gentry may 
often have stopped at Ecton to have their horses 
shod at the Franklin smithy. Benjamin's father 
came out in 1685, more than fifty years after the 
most notable Puritan emigration. Young Ben- 
jamin, born in 1706, was as untouched by the 
ardors of that elder generation as he would have 
been by the visions of Dante — an author, by the 
way, whom he never mentions, even as he never 



54 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

mentions Shakespeare. He had no reverence for 
Puritan New England. To its moral beauty, its 
fine severity, he was wholly blind. As a boy he 
thriftily sold his Pilgrim's Progress. He became, 
in the new fashion of that day, a Deist. Like a 
true child of the eighteenth century, his attitude 
toward the seventeenth was that of amused or 
contemptuous superiority. Thackeray has some- 
where a charming phrase about his own love for 
the back seat of the stage-coach, the seat which, 
in the old coaching days, gave one a view of the 
receding landscape. Thackeray, like Burke before 
him, loved historical associations, historical senti- 
ment, the backward look over the long road which 
humanity has traveled. But Franklin faced the 
other way. He would have endorsed his friend 
Jefferson's scornful sentence, "The dead have 
no rights." He joined himself wholly to that 
eighteenth century in which his own lot was cast, 
and, alike in his qualities and in his defects, he 
became one of its most perfect representatives. 
To catch the full spirit of that age, turn for 
an instant to the London of 1724 — the year of 
Franklin's arrival. Thirty-six years have elapsed 
since the glorious Revolution of 1688; the Whig 
principles, then triumphant, have been tacitly 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 55 
accepted by both political parties; the Jacobite 
revolt of 1715 has proved a fiasco; the country has 
accepted the House of Hanover and a government 
by party leadership of the House of Commons, 
and it does not care whether Sir Robert Walpole 
buys a few rotten boroughs, so long as he maintains 
peace with Europe and prosperity at home. 
England is weary of seventeenth century "enthusi- 
asm," weary of conflict, sick of idealism. She 
has found in the accepted Whig principles a satis- 
factory compromise, a working theory of society, 
a modus vivendi which nobody supposes is perfect 
but which will answer the prayer appointed to be 
read in all the churches, "Grant us peace in our 
time, Lord. " The theories to which men gave 
their lives in the seventeenth century seem ghostly 
in their unreality; but the prize turnips on Sir 
Robert's Norfolk farm, and the wines in his cellar, 
and the offices at his disposal — these are very real 
indeed. London merchants are making money; the 
squire and the parson are tranquilly ruling the coun- 
try parishes; the philosophy of John Locke is every- 
where triumphant. Mr. Pope is the poet of the hour, 
and his Essay on Man, counseling acceptance of our 
mortal situation, is considered to be the last word 
of human wisdom and of poetical elegance. In 



56 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

prose, the style of the Spectator rules — an admir- 
able style, Franklin thought, and he imitated it pa- 
tiently until its ease and urbanity had become his 
own. And indeed, how much of that London of 
the third decade of the century passed into the 
mind of the inquisitive, roving, loose-living print- 
er's apprentice from Philadelphia! It taught 
him that the tangible world is the real world, 
and that nothing succeeds like success; but it 
never even whispered to him that sometimes 
nothing damns like success. 

In his limitations, no less than in his power of 
assimilation, Franklin was the representative man 
of his era. He had no artistic interests, no liking 
for metaphysics after his brief devotion, in early 
manhood, to the dialogues of Plato. He taught 
himself some Latin, but he came to believe that 
the classics had little significance and that they 
should be superseded by the modern languages. 
For the mediaeval world he had no patience or 
understanding. To these defects of his century 
we must add some failings of his own. He was 
not always truthful. He had an indelible streak 
of coarseness. His conception of the "art of 
virtue" was mechanical. When Carlyle called 
Franklin the "father of all the Yankees," we must 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 57 

remember that the Scotch prophet hated Yankees 
and believed that FrankHn's smooth, plausible, 
trader type of morality was only a broad way to 
the everlasting bonfire. 

But it is folly to linger over the limitations of 
the tallow-chandler's son. The catalogue of his 
beneficent activity is a vast one. Balzac once 
characterized him as the man who invented the 
lightning-rod, the hoax, and the republic. His 
contributions to science have to do with electric- 
ity, earthquakes, geology, meteorology, physics, 
chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, navigation of 
air and water, agriculture, medicine, and hygiene. 
In some of these fields he did pioneer work of 
lasting significance. His teachings of thrift and 
prudence, as formulated in the maxims of Poor 
Richard, gave him a world-wide reputation. He 
attacked war, like Voltaire, not so much for its 
wickedness as for its folly, and cheerfully gave 
up many years of a long life to the effort to promote 
a better understanding among the nations of the 
world. 

It is perhaps needless to add what all persons 
who love good writing know, that Benjamin Frank- 
lin was a most delightful writer. His letters 
cover an amusing and extraordinary variety of 



58 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

topics. He ranges from balloons to summer hats, 
and from the advantages of deep ploughing to bi- 
focal glasses, which, by the way, he invented. He 
argues for sharp razors and cold baths, and for 
fresh air in the sleeping-room. He discusses the 
morals of the game of chess, the art of swimming, 
the evils of smoky chimneys, the need of reformed 
spelling. Indeed, his passion for improvement led 
him not only to try his hand upon an abridgment 
of the Book of Common Prayer, but to go even so 
far as to propose seriously a new rendering of the 
Lord's Prayer. His famous proposal for a new 
version of the Bible, however, which Matthew 
Arnold solenmly held up to reprobation, was only 
a joke which Matthew Arnold did not see — the 
new version of Job being, in fact, a clever bit of 
political satire against party leadership in England. 
Even more brilliant examples of his skill4n political 
satire are his imaginary Edict of the King of 
Prussia against England, and his famous Rules 
for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One. But 
I must not try to call the roll of all the good things 
in Franklin's ten volumes. I will simply say that 
those who know Franklin only in his Autobi- 
ography, charming as that classic production is, 
have made but an imperfect acquaintance with 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 59 

the range, the vitahty, the vigor of this admirable 
craftsman who chose a style "smooth, clear, and 
short," and made it serve every purpose of his 
versatile and beneficent mind. 

When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 
startled the American colonies out of their provin- 
cial sense of security and made them aware of their 
real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin 
was in London. Eleven years earlier, in 1754, 
he had offered a plan for the Union of the Colonies, 
but this had not contemplated separation from 
England. It was rather what we should call a 
scheme for imperial federation under the British 
Crown. We may use his word union, however, 
in a different field from that of politics. How 
much union of sentiment, of mental and moral 
life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, 
was there in the colonies when the hour of self- 
examination came? Only the briefest summary 
may be attempted here. 

As to race, these men of the third and fourth 
generation since the planting of the colonies were 
by no means so purely English as the first settlers. 
The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of 
many stocks, the largest non-English elements 
being German and Scotch-Irish — that is, Scotch 



60 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

who had settled for a while in Ulster before 
emigrating to America. "About one-third of the 
colonists in 1760," says Professor Channing, 
"were born outside of America.** Crevecoeur*s 
Letters from an American Farmer thus defined the 
Americans: "They are a mixture of English, 
Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans^ and 
Swedes. From this promiscuous breed that race 
now called Americans has arisen.*' The Atlantic 
seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly 
well covered by local communities, differing in 
blood, in religion, in political organization — 
"a congeries of separate experiments** or young 
Utopias, waiting for that most Utopian experi- 
ment of all, a federal union. But the dominant 
language of the "promiscuous breed" was English, 
and in the few real centers of intellectual life the 
English tradition was almost absolute. 

The merest glance at colonial journalism will 
confirm this estimate. The Boston News-Letter, 
begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if we 
omit the single issue of Puhlick Occurrences in 
the same town in 1690. By 1765 there were 
nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several maga- 
zines. Their influence made for union, in Frank- 
lin's sense of that word, and their literary models. 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 61 

like their paper, type, and even ink, were found 
in London. The New England Courant, estab- 
lished in Boston in 1721 by James Franklin, is 
full of imitations of the Tatlery Spectator, and 
Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of 
its oflBce collection of books, including Shakespeare, 
Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale of a Tub.^ 
This was in 1722. If we remember that no allu- 
sion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the 
colonial literature of the seventeenth century, 
and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton, 
and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 
had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, 
Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only recently 
obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we 
can appreciate the value of James Franklin's 
apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can even 
forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers 
which threw the conduct of the Courant, for a brief 
period, into the hands of his brother Benjamin, 
whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon 
to come. 

If we foUow this younger brother to Phila- 
delphia and to Bradford's American Mercury or 

' Cook, E. C. Literary Influences in Colonicd Newspapers, 170^- 
1750. N. Y., 1912. 



62 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

to Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, or if we 
study the Gazettes of Maryland, Virginia, and 
South Carolina, the impression is still the same. 
The literary news is still chiefly from London, from 
two months to a year late. London books are 
imported and reprinted. Franklin reprints Pa- 
mela, and his Library Company of Philadelphia has 
two copies of Paradise Lost for circulation in 1741, 
whereas there had been no copy of that work in the 
great library of Cotton Mather. American jour- 
nalism then, as now, owed its vitality to a secular 
spirit of curiosity about the actual world. It 
followed England as its model, but it was beginning 
to develop a temper of its own. 

Colonial education and colonial science were 
likewise chiefly indebted to London, but by 1751 
Franklin's papers on electricity began to repay 
the loan. A university club in New York in 1745 
could have had but fifteen members at most, for 
these were all the "academics" in town. Yet 
Harvard had then been sending forth her gradu- 
ates for more than a century. William and Mary 
was founded in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 
1746, King's (now Columbia) in 1754, the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania in 1755, and Brown 
in 1764. These colonial colleges were mainly 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 63 

in the hands of clergymen. They tended to 
reproduce a type of scholarship based upon 
the ancient languages. The curriculum varied 
but little in the different colonies, and this fact 
helped to produce a feeling of fellowship among 
all members of the republic of letters. The men 
who debated the Stamp Act were, with a few 
striking exceptions, men trained in Latin and 
Greek, familiar with the great outlines of human 
history, accustomed to the discipline of academic 
disputation. They knew the ideas and the 
vocabulary of cultivated Europe and were con- 
scious of no provincial inferiority. In the study 
of the physical sciences, likewise, the colonials 
were but little behind the mother country. The 
Royal Society had its distinguished members here. 
The Mathers, the Dudleys, John Winthrop of Con- 
necticut, John Bartram, James Logan, James God- 
frey, Cadwallader Golden, and above all, Franklin 
himself, were winning the respect of European 
students, and were teaching Americans to use their 
eyes and their minds not merely upon the records 
of the past but in searching out the inexhaustible 
meanings of the present. There is no more 
fascinating story than that of the beginnings of 
American science in and outside of the colleges. 



64 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

and this movement, like the influence of journalism 
and of the higher education, counted for colonial 
union. 

Professor Tyler, our foremost literary student 
of the period, summarizes the characteristics of 
colonial literature in these words: "Before the 
year 1765, we find in this country, not one Ameri- 
can people, but many American peoples. , . . No 
cohesive principle prevailed, no centralizing life; 
each little nation was working out its own destiny 
in its own fashion." But he adds that with that 
year the colonial isolation came to an end, and 
that the student must thereafter "deal with 
the literature of one multitudinous people, varie- 
gated, indeed, in personal traits, but single in its 
commanding ideas and in its national destinies." 
It is easy to be wise after the event. Yet there 
was living in London in 1765, as the agent for 
Pennsylvania, a shrewd and bland Colonial — an 
honorary M.A. from both Harvard and Yale, a 
D.C.L. of Oxford and an LL.D. of St. Andrews — 
who was by no means sure that the Stamp Act 
meant the end of Colonialism. And Franklin's 
uncertainty was shared by Washington. When 
the tall Virginian took command of the Conti- 
nental Army as late as 1775, he "abhorred the idea 



THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION 65 

of independence." Nevertheless John Jay, writ- 
ing the second number of the Federalist in 1787, 
only twelve years later, could say: "Providence 
has been pleased to give this one connected 
country to one united people;'a people descended 
from the same ancestors, speaking the same lan- 
guage, professing the same religion, attached to 
the same principles of government. " 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REVOLUTION 

If we turn, however, to the literature produced in 
America between the passage of the Stamp Act in 
1765 and the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, 
we perceive that it is a Hterature of discord and 
passion. Its spirit is not that of "one united 
people. " Washington could indeed declare in his 
Farewell Address of 1796, "With slight shades of 
difference, you have the same religion, manners, 
habits, and political principles"; yet no one 
knew better than Washington upon what a slen- 
der thread this political unity had often hung, 
and how impossible it had been to foresee the end 
from the beginning. 

It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolu- 
tionary period for the literature of beauty, for a 
quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper secrets 
of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, 
of action rather than reflection, of the turning 

66 



THE REVOLUTION 67 

of many separate currents into one headlong 
stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," 
runs Franklin's well-known witticism in Independ- 
ence Hall, "or, most assuredly, we shall all hang 
separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor! And 
that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the key- 
note of much of the Revolutionary writing that 
has survived. It may be heard in the state papers 
of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the 
pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Fre- 
neau and Trumbull, and in the subtle, insinuating, 
thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson. 

We can only glance in passing at the literature of 
the Lost Cause, the Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings 
for allegiance to Britain. It was written by able 
and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, 
Leonard and Galloway. They distrusted what 
Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the Mob." 
They represented, in John Adams's opinion, 
nearly one-third of the people of the colonies, and 
recent students believe that this estimate was 
too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were 
clearly in the majority. In all they were a menac- 
ing element, made up of the conservative, the 
prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of 
course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They 



68 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

composed weighty pamphlets, eloquent sermons, 
and sparkling satire in praise of the old order of 
things. When their cause was lost forever, they 
wrote gossipy letters from their exile in London 
or pathetic verses in their new home in Nova 
Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national 
life and literature has never been filled, and their 
talents and virtues are never likely to receive ade- 
quate recognition. They took the wrong fork of 
the road. 

There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, 
endowed with delicate literary gifts, but quite 
unsuited for the clash of controversy — members, 
in Crevecceur's touching words, of the "secret com- 
munion among good men throughout the world." 
"I am a lover of peace, what must I do?" asks 
Crevecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer. 
"I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. 
I feel that I am no longer so, therefore I regret the 
change. My heart sometimes seems tired with 
beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel op- 
pressed with so many watchings." Crevecoeur, an 
immigrant from Normandy, was certainly no weak- 
ling, but he felt that the great idyllic American 
adventure — which he described so captivatingly 
in his chapter entitled What is an American — was 



THE REVOLUTION 69 

ending tragically in civil war. Another white- 
souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of 
New Jersey, whose Journal, praised by Charles 
Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is 
finding more readers in the twentieth century than 
it won in the nineteenth. "A man unlettered," 
said Whittier, "but with natural refinement and 
delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart 
enters into his language." Woolman died at 
fifty-two in far-away York, England, whither he 
had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of 
Friends. 

The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition 
of the poems of Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, 
"Poet of the American Revolution." But our 
Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. 
The prose-men, such as Jefferson, rose nearer the 
height of the great argument than did the men of 
rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a 
brisk ballad like Francis Hopkinson's Battle of the 
KegSy a Hudibrastic satire like Trumbull's McFin- 
gal, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's 
Columbia. Freneau painted from his own experi- 
ence the horrors of the British prison-ship, and 
celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and 
Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw 



70 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Springs. There was patriotic verse in extraordin- 
ary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and 
it reveals few moods of the American mind that 
are not more perfectly conveyed through oratory, 
the pamphlet, and the political essay. The im- 
mediate models of this Revolutionary verze were 
the minor British bards of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, a century greatly given to verse-writing, 
but endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" 
mainly. The reader of Burton E. Stevenson's 
collection of Poems of American History can easily 
compare the contemporary verse inspired by the 
events of the Revolution with the modern verse 
upon the same historic themes. He will see how 
slenderly equipped for song were most of the later 
eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavor- 
able to poetry was the tone of that hour. 

Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long 
career, from the depressing indifference of his 
public to the true spirit of poetry. "An old 
college mate of mine," said James Madison — who 
was by tradition Freneau's room-mate at Prince- 
ton in the class of 1771 — "a poet and man of 
literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the 
world." When but three years out of college, 
the cautious Madison wrote to another friend: 



THE REVOLUTION 71 

"Poetry wit and Criticism Romances Plays &c 
captivated me much: but I begin to discover 
that they deserve but a moderate portion of 
a mortal's Time and that something more sub- 
stantial more durable more profitable befits 
our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe 
age of twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Fre- 
neau's editor, quotes these words to illustrate the 
"common sense" atmosphere of the age which 
proved fatal to Freneau's development. Yet 
the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot de- 
scent, is a charming figure, and his later malevo- 
lence was shown only to his political foes. After 
leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the law, the 
newspaper, the sea; he is aflame with patriotic 
zeal; he writes, like most American poets, far 
too much for his own reputation. As the editor of 
the National Gazette in Philadelphia, he becomes 
involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, 
Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. His attach- 
ment to the cause of the French Revolution makes 
him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. 
By and by he retires to a New Jersey farm, still 
toying with journalism, still composing verses. 
He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 
1812; but the public has now forgotten him. 



72 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

He lives on in poverty and seclusion, and in his 
eightieth year loses his way in a snowstorm and 
perishes miserably — this in 1832, the year of the 
death of the great Sir Walter Scott, who once had 
complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his 
best lines of poetry. 

It is in the orations and pamphlets and state- 
papers inspired by the Revolutionary agitation 
that we find the most satisfactory expression of 
the thought and feeling of that generation. Its 
typical literature is civic rather than aesthetic, a 
sort of writing which has been incidental to the 
accomplishing of some political, social, or moral 
purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as 
literature at all. James Otis's argument against 
the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, 
and Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House 
of Burgesses in 1765, mark epochs in the emotional 
Kfe of these communities. They were reported 
imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be 
ignored in an assessment of our national experience 
than editorials, sermons, or conversations which 
have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and 
then have perished beyond resurrection. 

Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be 
denied a strictly "literary" rating because their 



THE REVOLUTION 73 

surviving words are obviously inadequate to 
account for the popular effect of their speeches, it 
is still possible to measure the efficiency of the 
pamphleteer. When John Adams tells us that 
*' James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we 
must take his word for the impression which Otis's 
oratory left upon his mind. But John Adams's 
own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite 
our judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic 
splendor" of his hyperboles need not blind us to his 
real literary excellencies, such as clearness, candor, 
vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, 
"difficult" person was John Adams, but he grew 
mellower with age, and his latest letters and 
journals are full of whimsical charm. 

John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a 
charming person. Bigoted, tireless, secretive, this 
cunning manipulator of political passions followed 
many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit 
misstatement of an adversary's position has been 
equaled but once in our history. But to the 
casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams 
seems ever to be breathing the liberal air of the 
town-meeting: everything is as plainly obvious as 
a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large 
utterance of the European Hberalism of his day. 



74 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

"Resolved," read his Resolutions of the House of 
Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that 
there are certain essential rights of the British 
constitution of government which are founded in 
the law of God and nature and are the common 
rights of mankind." In his statement of the 
Rights of the Colonists (1772) we are assured that 
"among the natural rights of the colonists are 
these, First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; 
thirdly to Property. . . . All men have a Right to 
remain in a State of Nature as long as they please. 
. . . When Men enter into Society, it is by volun- 
tary consent. " Jean-Jacques himself could not be 
more bland, nor at heart more fiercely demagogic. 
"Tom" Paine would have been no match for 
"Sam" Adams in a town-meeting, but he was an 
even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from 
England in 1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having 
hitherto failed in most of his endeavors for a liveli- 
hood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unk^apt," says 
Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there 
was "genius in his eyes," and he bore a letter of 
introduction from Franklin commending him as an 
"ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained 
for him a position on the Pennsylvania Magazine. 
Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine 



THE REVOLUTION 75 

was writing the most famous pamphlet of our 
political literature, Common Sense, which appeared 
in January, 1776. "A style hitherto unknown on 
this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Ran- 
dolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd 
had been used seventy years earlier by Defoe and 
Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt 
American frontiersman who was bom in 1809, the 
year of Thomas Paine's death. The Crisis, a 
series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first was 
issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the 
contemporary opinion that the ''American cause 
owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword 
of Washington. " Paine, who was now serving in 
the army, might have heard his own words, "These 
are the times that try men's souls," read aloud, 
by Washington's orders, to the ragged troops just 
before they crossed the Delaware to win the vic- 
tory of Trenton. The best known productions of 
Paine's subsequent career, The Rights of Man and 
The Age of Reason, were written in Europe, but 
they were read throughout America. The repu- 
tation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered 
from certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous 
charge of atheism. He was no more an atheist 
than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original 



76 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

thinker, lie could impart to outworn shreds of 
deistic controversy and to shallow generalizations 
about democracy a personal fervor which trans- 
formed them and made his pages gay and bold and 
clear as a trumpet. 

Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton 
likewise; and his literary services to the Revolu- 
tion are less likely to be underestimated than 
Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish 
speech in "the Fields" of New York City in 1774 
and with The Farmer Refuted^ a reply to Samuel 
Seabury's Westchester Farmer. They were con- 
tinued in extraordinary letters, written during 
Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of the 
Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the 
Confederation. Hamilton contributed but little 
to the actual structure of the new Constitution, 
but as a debater he fought magnificently and 
triumphantly for its adoption by the Convention 
of the State of New York in 1788. Together with 
Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental 
principles of the Federal Union in the remarkable 
series of papers known as the Federalist. These 
eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature 
"Publius" in two New York newspapers between 
October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed their con- 



THE REVOLUTION 77 

ception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than 
haK of them himself. In manner they are not 
unlike the substantial Whig literature of England, 
and in political theory they have little in common 
with the Revolutionary literature which we have 
been considering. The reasoning is close, the style 
vigorous but neither warmed by passion nor 
colored by the individual emotions of the author. 
The Federalist remains a classic example of the 
civic quality of our post-Revolutionary American 
political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well 
informed as to the past, confident — but not reck- 
less — of the future. Many Americans still read 
it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and 
bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the 
Hterary genius of either of those writers, but 
its formative influence upon successive genera- 
tions of pohtical thinking has been steadying and 
sound. 

In fact, our citizen literature cannot be under- 
stood aright if one fails to observe that its effect 
has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill, but 
upon the weight of character behind the words. 
Thus the grave and reserved George Washington 
says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us raise a 
standard to which the wise and the honest can 



78 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

repair; the event is in the hand of God." The 
whole personality of the great Virginian is back of 
that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our 
feet, like a national anthem. 

One American, no doubt our most gifted man of 
letters of that century, passed most of the Revolu- 
tionary period abroad, in the service of his country. 
Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the 
Stamp Act. When he returned from France in 
1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was still writing 
as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. 
We cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fas- 
cinating American better than by quoting the 
letter which George Washington wrote to him in 
September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality 
of the eighteenth century, but it is warm with 
tested friendship and it glows with deep human 
feeling :" If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be 
admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriot- 
ism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify 
the human mind, you must have the pleasing con- 
solation to know that you have not lived in vain. 
And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked 
among the least grateful occurrences of your life 
to be assured, that, so long as I retain my memory, 
you will be rec»llected with respect, veneration. 



THE REVOLUTION 79 

and affection by your sincere friend, George Wash- 
ington." 

There remains another Virginian, the symbol of 
the Revolutionary age, the author of words more 
widely known around the globe than any other 
words penned by an American. "Thomas Jeffer- 
son," writes the latest of his successors in the Presi- 
dency, "was not a man of the people, but he was a 
man of such singular insight that he saw that all the 
roots of generous power come from the people. ' ' On 
his father's side Jefferson came from sound yeoman 
stock, in which W^elsh blood ran. His mother 
was a Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle 
County, near the "little mountain" — Monticello 
— where he built a mansion for his bride and where 
he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray- 
eyed, gifted boy was reputed the best shot, the best 
rider, the best fiddle-player in the county. He 
studied hard at William and Mary over his Greek, 
Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also 
frequented the best society of the little capital. 
He learned to call himself a Deist and to theorize 
about ideal commonwealths. There was already 
in him that latent radicalism which made him 
strike down, as soon as he had the power, two of the 
fundamental principles of the society into which he 



80 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

was born, the principle of entailed property and 
that of church establishment. 

Such was the youth of twenty-two who was 
thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp Act. In the ten 
years of passionate discussion which followed, two 
things became clear: first, that there had long 
existed among the colonists very radical theoretical 
notions of political freedom; and second, that there 
was everywhere a spirit of practical conserva- 
tism. Jefiferson illustrates the union of these two 
tendencies. 

He took his seat in the Continental Congress in 
June, 1775. He was only thirty-two, but he had 
already written, in the summer of 1774, A Sum- 
mary View of the Rights of British America which 
had been published in England by Burke, himself 
a judge of good writing and sound politics. Jeffer- 
son had also prepared in 1775 the Address of the 
Virginia House of Burgesses. For these reasons he 
was placed at the head of the Committee for draft- 
ing the Declaration of Independence. We need 
not linger over the familiar circumstances of its 
composition. Everybody knows how Franklin 
and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the 
first draft, how the committee of five then reported 
it to the Congress, which proceeded to cut out 



THE REVOLUTION 81 

about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin 
tried to comfort the writhing author with his cheer- 
ful story about the sign of John Thompson the 
hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply 
to the charge of lack of originality brought against 
the Declaration by Timothy Pickering and John 
Adams — charges which have been repeated at 
intervals ever since — Jefferson replied philosophi- 
cally: "Whether I gathered my ideas from reading 
or reflection I do not know. I know only that I 
turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing 
it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge 
to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no 
sentiment which had ever been expressed before." 
wise young man, and fundamentally Anglo- 
Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that crisis, 
to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recog- 
nized facts and accepted sentiments! But his 
pen retains its cunning in spite of him; and the 
drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopoli- 
tan reading and thinking tell; and they transform 
what Pickering called a "commonplace compila- 
tion, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for 
two years before," into an immortal manifesto to 
mankind. 

Its method is the simplest. The preamble is 



82 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

philosophical, dealing with "self-evident" truths. 
Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths 
dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use 
another term of derogation favored by reaction- 
aries, "French." But if the preamble be French 
and philosophical, the specific charges against the 
King are very English and practical. Here are 
certain facts, presented no doubt with consummate 
rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo- 
Saxon in Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for 
academic philosophizing after the French fashion 
is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep 
and enduring vitality of this matchless state 
paper lie in its illumination of stubborn facts by 
general principles, its decent respect to the opin- 
ions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance 
of national sentiments and national reasons to a 
"candid world." 

It has long been the fashion, among a certain 
school of half-hearted Americans — and unless I 
am mistaken, the teaching has increased during 
the last decades — to minimize the value of Jeffer- 
son's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, him- 
self a consummate rhetorician, sneered at those 
"glittering generalities," and countless college- 
bred men, some of them occupying the highest 



THE REVOLUTION 83 

positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence of 
the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course 
in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with 
the subsidiary phrase about governments "deriv- 
ing their just powers from the consent of the 
governed." Editors and congressmen and even 
college professors have proclaimed themselves 
unable to assent to these phrases of the Declara- 
tion, and unable even to understand them. These 
objectors belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's 
category of "nervous persons" — "anti-repub- 
licans," as he goes on to define them — "whose 
languid fibres have more analogy with a passive 
than an active state of things." Other objectors 
to the phrase "all men are created equal" have 
had an obvious personal or political motive for 
refusing assent to the proposition. But "no in- 
telligent man, " says one of Jefferson's biographers, 
"has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except 
intentionally. '* 

Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jeffer- 
son's statement of the sentiments and reasons for 
the independence of the thirteen British colonies 
in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political 
wisdom, fit for all the exigencies of contemporary 
American democracy. It is not that. It is 



84 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard 
maxims of free society** which no democracy can 
safely disregard. 

Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so 
responsive to the touch of popular forces, illus- 
trates the process by which the Virginia mind of 
1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 
1826. It is needless here to dwell upon the traits 
of his personal character: his sweetness of spirit, 
his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of 
money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have 
no ambition to govern men," he wrote to Edward 
Rutledge. He was far happier talking about 
Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster 
before the fire-place of Monticello than he ever 
was in the presidential chair. His correspondence 
was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. 
In his theories of education he was fifty years 
ahead of his time; in his absolute trust in humanity 
he was generations ahead of it. "I am not one of 
those who fear the people," he declared proudly. 
It is because of this touching faith, this invincible 
and matchless ardor, that Jefferson is today re- 
membered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His be- 
lief in the inarticulate common people is rewarded 
by their obstinate fidelity to his name as a type and 



THE REVOLUTION 85 

symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the 
ultimate powers of society but the people them- 
selves, " wrote Jefferson, and with the people them- 
selves is the depository of his fame. 



CHAPTER V 

THE KNICKERBOCKEK GROUP 

The Fourth of July orator for 1826 in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, was Edward Everett. Although 
only thirty-two he was already a distinguished 
speaker. In the course of his oration he apostro- 
phized John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as 
venerable survivors of that momentous day, fifty 
years earlier, which had witnessed our Declaration 
of Independence. But even as Everett was speak- 
ing, the aged author of the Declaration breathed 
his last at Monticello, and in the afternoon of that 
same day Adams died also, murmuring, it is said, 
with his latest breath, and as if with the whimsical 
obstinacy of an old man who hated to be beaten 
by his ancient rival, "Thomas Jefferson still lives. " 
But Jefferson was already gone. 

On the first of August, Everett commemorated 
the career of the two Revolutionary leaders, and 
on the following day a greater than Everett, Daniel 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 87 

Webster, pronounced the famous eulogy in Faneuil 
Hall. Never were the thoughts and emotions of a 
whole country more adequately voiced than in this 
commemorative oratory. Its pulse was high with 
national pride over the accomplishments of half 
a century. "I ask," Everett declared, "whether 
more has not been done to extend the domain of 
civilization, in fifty years, since the Declaration of 
Independence, than would have been done in five 
centuries of continued colonial subjection.'* " Web- 
ster asserted in his peroration: "It cannot be 
denied, but by those who would dispute against 
the sun, that with America, and in America, a new 
era commences in human affairs. This era is 
distinguished by free representative governments, 
by entire religious liberty, by improved systems 
of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and 
an unconquerable spirit of free enquiry, and by 
a diffusion of knowledge through the community 
such as has been before altogether unknown and 
unheard of." 

Was this merely the "tall talk" then so charac- 
teristic of American oratory and soon to be satirized 
in Martin Chuzzlewit? Or was it prompted by a 
deep and true instinct for the significance of the 
vast changes that had come over American life 



88 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

since 1776? The external changes were familiar 
enough to Webster's auditors : the opening of seem- 
ingly illimitable territory through the Louisiana 
Purchase, the development of roads, canals, and 
manufactures; a rapid increase in wealth and popu- 
lation; a shifting of political power due to the rise 
of the new West — in a word, the evidences of ir- 
repressible national energy. But this energy was 
inadequately expressed by the national literature. 
The more cultivated Americans were quite aware 
of this deficiency. It was confessed by the pessi- 
mistic Fisher Ames and by the ardent young men 
who in 1815 founded The North American Review, 
British critics in The Edinburgh and The Quarterly, 
commenting upon recent works of travel in Amer- 
ica, pointed out the literary poverty of the Amer- 
ican soil. Sydney Smith, by no means the most 
offensive of these critics, declared in 1820: "Dur- 
ing the thirty or forty years of their independence 
they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, 
for the arts, for literature. ... In the four 
quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? 
or goes to an American play? or looks at an Amer- 
ican picture or statue?" 

Sydney Smith's question "Who reads an Amer- 
ican book?" has outlived all of his own clever 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 89 

volumes. Even while he was asking it, London 
was eagerly reading living's Sketch Booh. In 1821 
came Fenimore Cooper's 8'py and Bryant's Poems, 
and by 1826, when Webster was announcing in his 
rolling orotund that Adams and Jefferson were no 
more, the London and Paris booksellers were cover- 
ing their stalls with Cooper's The Last of the Mo- 
hicans. Irving, Cooper, and Bryant are thus the 
pioneers in a new phase of American literary 
activity, often called, for convenience in labeling, 
the Knickerbocker Group because of the identi- 
fication of these men with New York. And close 
behind these leaders come a younger company, 
destined likewise, in the shy boyish words of 
Hawthorne, one of the number, "to write books 
that would be read in England." For by 1826 
Hawthorne and Longfellow were out of college and 
were trying to learn to write. Ticknor, Prescott, 
and Bancroft, somewhat older men, were settling 
to their great tasks. Emerson was entering upon 
his duties as a minister. Edgar Allan Poe, at 
that University of Virginia which Jefferson had 
just founded, was doubtless revising Tamerlane 
and Other Poems which he was to publish in Boston 
in the following year. Holmes was a Har- 
vard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed 



90 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Whittier's first published poem in the Newbury- 
port Free Press. Walt Whitman was a barefooted 
boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven 
years of age, was watching the birds in the tree- 
tops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving 
who showed all of these men that nineteenth cen- 
tury England would be interested in American 
books. 

The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence 
of the vitality of Irving's happy imaginings. In 
1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian 
of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and 
fathered upon him a witty parody of Dr. Mitchill's 
grave Picture of New York. To read Irving's 
chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and 
most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual 
beginning of a legend which the world is unwilling 
to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's 
sides ache with laughter, and reminded him of the 
humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain New 
Yorkers were slow to see the joke. 

Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at 
the close of the Revolution, of a Scotch father and 
English mother. His youth was pleasantly idle, 
with a little random education, much theater- 
going, and plentiful rambles with a gun along the 



'k'tM^'^M^ 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
Marble bust bv Henrv K. Brown. 




EDWARD EVERETT 
Plaster cast of bust by Clevenger. 




JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 
After a painting by J. W. .Jarvis. 




WASHINGTON IRVING 
After a painting by C. R. Leslie. 



90 .. TTKjRATURE 

W']', '-> r ■ v; 1 ul i v' . i t A iv N<-> wbury- 

jfooted 
iig Island, and Lo seven 

•••it-: of age, was watching IT!. ^'. ■ v '=e T,et-- 

who showed all of these men that 
tury England would be mterested h 
books. 

The very W' >ocker is one evidence 

of the \atality maginings. In 

1809 he had invented am - nan 

of New York named Diedncn _ii 

father- ' - ' ; , -+ty parody ^ 

grave York, To read 

chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and 
most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual 
beginning of a legend which the world is unwilling 
to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott': 
ii'[rs :j( n>- witli laughter, and rciomcieci i.nn of . i. 

Yorkers ?. 

Irving was himself a N )orn just at 

the close of the Revolution, ot a wkotch father and 

His youth was pleasantly idle, 

, :, .,, , s ni education, much theater- 

gohiif, and ,mbles with a gun along the 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 91 

Hudson River. In 1804 he went abroad for his 
health, returned and helped to write the light social 
satire of the Salmagundi Papers, and became, after 
the publication of the Knickerbocker History, a 
local celebrity. Sailing for England in 1815 on 
business, he stayed until 1832 as a roving man of 
letters in England and Spain and then as Secretary 
of the American Legation in London. The Sketch 
Book, Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveler are 
the best known productions of Irving's fruitful 
residence in England. The Life of Columbus, the 
Conquest of Granada, and The Alhambra represent 
his first sojourn in Spain. After his return to 
America he became fascinated with the Great 
West, made the travels described in his Tour of the 
Prairies, and told the story of roving trappers and 
the fur trade in Captain Bonneville and Astoria. 
For four years he returned to Spain as American 
Minister. In his last tranquil years at Sunnyside 
on the Hudson, where he died in 1859, he wrote 
graceful lives of Goldsmith and of Washington. 

Such a glance at the shelf containing Irving's 
books suggests but little of that personal quality 
to which he owes his significance as an interpreter 
of America to the Old World. This son of a 
narrow, hard, Scotch dealer in cutlery, this drifter 



92 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

about town when New York was only a big slov- 
enly village, this light-hearted scribbler of satire 
and sentiment, was a gentleman born. His boyhood 
and youth were passed in that period of Post- 
Revolutionary reaction which exhibits the United 
States in some of its most unlovely aspects. 
Historians like Henry Adams and McMaster have 
painted in detail the low estate of education, re- 
ligion, and art as the new century began. The 
bitter feeling of the nascent nation toward Great 
Britain was intensified by the War of 1812. The 
Napoleonic Wars had threatened to break the last 
threads of our friendship for France, and suspicion 
of the Holy Alliance led to an era of national self- 
assertion of which the Monroe Doctrine was only 
one expression. The raw Jacksonism of the West 
seemed to be gaining upon the older civilizations 
represented by Virginia and Massachusetts. The 
self-made type of man began to pose as the genuine 
American. And at this moment came forward a 
man of natural lucidity and serenity of mind, of 
perfect poise and good temper, who knew both 
Europe and America and felt that they ought to 
know one another better and to like one another 
more. That was Irving's service as an inter- 
national mediator. He diffused sweetness and 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 93 

light in an era marked by bitterness and obscura- 
tion. It was a triumph of character as well as of 
literary skill. 

But the skill was very noticeable also. living's 
prose is not that of the Defoe-Swift-Franklin- 
Paine type of plain talk to the crowd. It is rather 
an inheritance from that other eighteenth century 
tradition, the conversation of the select circle. 
Its accents were heard in Steele and Addison and 
were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, 
and Charles Lamb. Among Irving's successors, 
George William Curtis and Charles Dudley War- 
ner and Wilham Dean Howells have been masters 
of it likewise. It is mellow human talk, delicate, 
regardful, capable of exquisite modulation. With 
instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and 
sound style upon fresh American material. In 
Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 
he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, and 
for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have 
perceived the exquisite fitness of the language to 
the images and ideas which Irving desired to con- 
vey. To render the Far West of that epoch this 
style is perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but 
when used as Irving uses it in describing Stratford 
and Westminster Abbey and an Old English 



94 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Christmas, it becomes again a perfect medium. 
Hawthorne adopted it for Our Old Homey and Eng- 
hshmen recognized it at once as a part of their 
own inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the 
voyage across the Atlantic and home again. Ir- 
ving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said, as 
Englishmen would have liked to write about it. 
When he described the Alhambra and Granada 
and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in 
physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie, which 
revealed to the world the quick American appre- 
ciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its key 
is sympathy. 

Irving's popularity has endured in England. It 
suffered during the middle of the century in his 
own country, for the strongest New England 
authors taught the public to demand more thought 
and passion than were in Irving's nature. Possibly 
the nervous, journalistic style of the twentieth 
century allows too scanty leisure of mind for the 
full enjoyment of the Knickerbocker flavor. Yet 
such changes as these in literary fashion scarcely 
affect the permanent service of Irving to our liter- 
ature. He immortalized a local type — the New 
York Dutchman — and local legends, like that of 
Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of the 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 95 

narrative essay to create something almost like 
the perfected short story of Poe and Hawthorne; 
he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an age when 
charm was lacking; and, if he had no message, it 
should be remembered that some of the most use- 
ful ambassadors have had none save to reveal, 
with delicacy and tact and humorous kindness, the 
truth that foreign persons have feelings precisely 
like our own. 

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Journal may 
remember his account of an evening party in Paris 
in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in 
the height of his European reputation. "So the 
Scotch and American lions took the field together, " 
wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous. The 
Last of the Mohicans, then just published, threat- 
ened to eclipse the fame of Ivanhoe. Cooper, born 
in 1789, was eighteen years younger than the Wiz- 
ard of the North, and was more deeply indebted 
to him than he knew. For it was Scott who had 
created the immense nineteenth century audience 
for prose fiction, and who had evolved a kind of 
formula for the novel, ready for Cooper's use. 
Both men were natural story-tellers. Scott had 
the richer mind and the more fully developed 
historical imagination. Both were out-of-doors 



96 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

men, lovers of manly adventure and of natm*al 
beauty. But the American had the good fortune 
to be able to utilize in his books his personal 
experiences of forest and sea and to reveal to 
Europe the real romance of the American wilder- 
ness. 

That Cooper was the first to perceive the ar- 
tistic possibilities of this romance, no one would 
claim. Brockden Brown, a Quaker youth of 
Philadelphia, a disciple of the English Godwin, 
had tried his hand at the very end of the eighteenth 
century upon American variations of the Gothic 
romance then popular in England. Brown had a 
keen eye for the values of the American landscape 
and even of the American Indian. He had a knack 
for passages of ghastly power, as his descriptions 
of maniacs, murderers, sleep-walkers, and soli- 
taries abundantly prove. But he had read too 
much and lived too little to rival the masters of 
the art of fiction. And there was a traveled 
Frenchman, Chateaubriand, surely an expert in 
the art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to 
the pages of his American Indian stories, Atala 
and RenS, the mystery and enchantment of our 
dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateau- 
briand, like Brockden Brown, is feverish. A taint 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 97 

of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like a 
miasma over his magnificent panorama of the 
wilderness. Cooper, like Scott, is masculine. 

He was a Knickerbocker only by adoption. 
Born in New Jersey, his childhood was spent in the 
then remote settlement of Cooperstown in Central 
New York. He had a little schooling at Albany, 
and a brief and inglorious career at Yale with the 
class of 1806. He went to sea for two years, and 
then served for three years in the United States 
Navy upon Lakes Ontario and Champlain, the 
very scene of some of his best stories. In 1811 
he married, resigned from the Navy, and settled 
upon a little estate in Westchester County, near 
New York. Until the age of thirty, he was not in 
the least a bookman, but a healthy man of action. 
Then, as the well-known anecdote goes, he exclaims 
to his wife, after reading a stupid English novel, 
"I believe I could write a better story myself." 
Precaution (1820) was the result, but whether it 
was better than the unknown English book, no 
one can now say. It was bad enough. Yet the 
next year Cooper published The Spy, one of the 
finest of his novels, which was instantly welcomed 
in England and translated in France. Then came, 
in swift succession. The PioneerSy the first Leather- 



98 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Stocking tale in order of composition, and The 
Pilot, to show that Scott's Pirate was written by a 
landsman! Lionel Lincoln and The Last of the 
Mohicans followed. The next seven years were 
spent in Europe, mainly in France, where The 
Prairie and The Red Rover were written. Cooper 
now looked back upon his countrymen with eyes 
of critical detachment, and made ready to tell 
them some of their faults. He came home to 
Cooperstown in 1833, the year after Irving's re- 
turn to America. He had won, deservedly, a great 
fame, which he proceeded to imperil by his com- 
bativeness with his neighbors and his harsh stric- 
tures upon the national character, due mainly to 
his lofty conception of the ideal America. He 
continued to spin yarns of sea and shore, and to 
write naval history. The tide of fashion set 
against him in the eighteen-forties when Bulwer 
and Dickens rode into favor, but the stout- 
hearted old pioneer could afford to bide his time. 
He died in 1851, just as Mrs. Stowe was writing 
Uncle Tom's Cabin. 

Two generations have passed since then, and 
Cooper's place in our literature remains secure. 
To have written our first historical novel. The Spy, 
our first sea-story. The Pilot, and to have created 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 99 

the Leather-Stocking series, is glory enough. In 
his perception of masculine character. Cooper 
ranks with Fielding. His sailors, his scouts and 
spies, his good and bad Indians, are as veritable 
human figures as Squire Western. Long Tom 
Coffin, Harvey Birch, Hawk-Eye, and Chingach- 
gook are physically and morally true to life itself. 
Read the Leather-Stocking books in the order of 
the events described, beginning with The Deerslayer, 
then The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, 
The Pioneers, and ending with the vast darkening 
horizon of The Prairie and the death of the trapper, 
and one will feel how natural and inevitable are 
the fates of the personages and the alterations in 
the life of the frontier. These books vary in their 
poetic quality and in the degree of their realism, 
but to watch the evolution of the leading figure is 
to see human life in its actual texture. 

Clever persons and pedantic persons have united 
to find fault with certain elements of Cooper's 
art. Mark Twain, in one of his least inspired 
moments, selected Cooper's novels for attack. 
Every grammar school teacher is ready to point 
out that his style is often prolix and his sentences 
are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even 
criticize Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed 



100 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No doubt one 
must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and in- 
capacity'* of most of Cooper's women, and the 
dreadfulness of his bores, particularly the Scotch- 
men, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir 
Walter, Cooper seems to have taken but little pains 
in the deliberate planning of his plots. Frequently 
he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and 
hero, predicament and escape, renewed crisis and 
rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a 
third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in his genius 
for action, the beauty and grandeur of his land- 
scapes, the primitive veracity of his children of 
nature. 

Cooper was an elemental man, and he compre- 
hended, by means of something deeper than mere 
artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity 
in the presence of the wide ocean or of the deep 
woods. He is as healthy and sane as Fielding, and 
he possesses an additional quality which all of the 
purely English novelists lack. It was the result 
of his youthful sojourn in the wilderness. Let 
us call it the survival in him of an aboriginal 
imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of 
a moose — an ungraceful creature perhaps, but 
indubitably big, as many a hunter has suddenly 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 101 

realized when he has come unexpectedly upon a 
moose that whirled to face him in the twilight 
silence of a northern wood. 

Something of this far-off and gigantic primi- 
tivism inheres also in the poetry of William Cullen 
Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white 
beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the 
Bard as the Druids might have known him. But 
in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr. Bryant's 
alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he 
strode down Broadway to the Evening Post office, 
suggested little more than a vigorous and somewhat 
radical editor of an increasingly prosperous Demo- 
cratic newspaper. There was nothing of the 
Fringed Gentian or Yellow Violet about him. Like 
so many of the Kiiickerbockers, Bryant was an 
immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her 
adopted men of letters have represented so per- 
fectly the inherited traits of the New England 
Puritan. To understand his long and honorable 
public life it is necessary to know something of the 
city of his choice, but to enter into the spirit of his 
poetry one must go back to the hills of western 
Massachusetts. 

Bryant had a right to his cold-weather mind. 
He came from Mayflower stock. His father, Dr. 



102 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Peter Bryant of Cummington, was a sound coun- 
try physician, with liberal preferences in theology, 
Federalist views in politics, and a library of seven 
hundred volumes, rich in poetry. The poet's 
mother records his birth in her diary in terse words 
which have the true Spartan tang: "Nov. 3, 1794. 
Stormy, wind N. E. Churned. Seven in the 
evening a son born. " Two days later the Novem- 
ber wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind 
N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. 
Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, 
had an abnormally large head and was dipped, 
day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy 
spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a 
stern, somewhat unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. 
The little fellow, lying prone with his brothers 
before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English 
poetry from his father's library, used to pray that 
he too might become a poet. At thirteen he pro- 
duced a satire on Jefferson, The Embargo, which his 
proud Federalist father printed at Boston in 1808. 
The youth had nearly one year at Williams Col- 
lege, over the mountain ranges to the west. He 
wished to continue his education at Yale, but his 
father had no money for this greater venture, and 
the son remained at home. There, in the autumn 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 103 

of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first 
draft of Thanatoysis . He was seventeen, and 
he had been reading Blair's Grave and the poems 
of the consumptive Henry Kirke White. He hid 
his verses in a drawer, and five years later his 
father found them, shed tears over them, and sent 
them to the North American Review, where they 
were published in September, 1817. 

In the meantime the young man had studied law, 
though with dislike of it, and with the confession 
that he sometimes read The Lyrical Ballads when 
he might have been reading Blackstone. One 
December afternoon in 1815, he was walking from 
Cummington to Plainfield — aged twenty-one, and 
looking for a place in which to settle as a lawyer. 
Across the vivid simset flew a black duck, as soli- 
tary and homeless as himself. The bird seemed an 
image of his own soul, "lone wandering but not 
lost." Before he slept that night he had composed 
the poem To a Waterfowl. No more authentic 
inspiration ever visited a poet, and though Bryant 
wrote verse for more than sixty years after that 
crimson sky had paled into chill December twilight, 
his lines never again vibrated with such communi- 
cative passion. 

Bryant's ensuing career revealed the steady pur- 



104 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

pose, the stoicism, the reticence of the Puritan. 
It was highly successful, judged even by material 
standards. Thanatopsis had been instantly re- 
garded in 1817 as the finest poem yet produced in 
America. The author was invited to contribute 
to the North American Review an essay on American 
poetry, and this, like all of Bryant's prose work, 
was admirably written. He delivered his Harvard 
Phi Beta Kappa poem, The Ages, in 1821, the year 
of Emerson's graduation. After a brief practice of 
the law in Great Barrington, he entered in 1826 
into the unpromising field of journalism in New 
York. While other young Knickerbockers wasted 
their literary strength on trifles and dissipated their 
moral energies, Bryant held steadily to his daily 
task. His life in town was sternly ascetic, but he 
allowed himself long walks in the country, and he 
continued to meditate a somewhat thankless Muse. 
In 1832 he visited his brothers on the Illinois prai- 
ries, and stopped one day to chat with a "tall awk- 
ward uncouth lad" of racy conversational powers, 
who was leading his company of volunteers into 
the Black Hawk War. The two men were destined 
to meet again in 1860, when Bryant presided at 
that Cooper Union address of Lincoln's which re- 
vealed to New York and to the country that the 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 105 

former captain of volunteers was now a king of 
men. Lincoln was embarrassed on that occasion, 
it is said, by Bryant's fastidious, dignified presence. 
Not so Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had seen the 
poet in Rome, two years before. "There was a 
weary look in his face," wrote Hawthorne, "as if 
he were tired of seeing things and doing things. 
. . . He uttered neither passion nor poetry, but 
excellent good sense, and accurate information, 
on whatever subject transpired; a very pleasant 
man to associate with, but rather cold, I should 
imagine, if one should seek to touch his heart with 
one's own." Such was the impression Bryant 
made upon less gifted men than Hawthorne, as he 
lived out his long and useful life in the Knicker- 
bocker city. Toward the close of it he was in 
great demand for public occasions; and it was after 
delivering a speech dedicating a statue to Mazzini 
in Central Park in 1878, when Bryant was eighty- 
four, that a fit of dizziness caused a fall which 
proved fatal to the venerable poet. It was just 
seventy years since Dr. Peter Bryant had published 
his boy's verses on The Embargo. 

Although Bryant's poetry has never roused any 
vociferous excitement, it has enduring qualities. 
The spiritual preoccupations of many a voiceless 



106 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

generation of New England Puritans found a 
tongue at last in this late-born son of theirs. The 
determining mood of his best poems, from boy- 
hood to old age, was precisely that thought of 
transiency, "the eternal flow of things," which 
colored the imaginations of the first colonists. 
This is the central motive of Thanatopsisy To a 
Waterfowl, The Rivulet, A Forest Hymn, An Evening 
Revery, The Crowded Street, The Flood of Years. 
All of these tell the same story of endless change 
and of endless abiding, of varying eddies in the 
same mighty stream of human existence. Bryant 
faced the thought as calmly, as majestically, at 
seventeen as when he wrote The Flood of Years at 
eighty-two. He is a master of description, though 
he has slight gift for narrative or drama, and he 
rarely sounds the clear lyric note. But everywhere 
in his verse there is that cold purity of the winter 
hills in Western Massachusetts, something austere 
and elemental which reaches kindred spirits below 
the surface on which intellect and passion have 
their play, something more primitive, indeed, than 
human intellect or passion and belonging to an- 
other mode of being, something "rock-ribbed and 
ancient as the sun. " 

A picture of the Knickerbocker era is not com- 



THE KNICKERBOCKER GROUP 107 

plete without its portraits of the minor figures in 
the literary life of New York up to the time of the 
Civil War. But the scope of the present volume 
does not permit sketches of Paulding and Ver- 
planck, of Halleck and his friend Drake, of N. P. 
Willis and Morris and Woodworth. Some of these 
are today only "single-poem" men, like Payne, 
the author of Home Sweet Home, just as Key, the 
author of The Star-Spangled Banner, is today 
a "single-poem" man of an earlier generation. 
Their names will be found in such limbos of the 
dead as Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America 
and Poe's Literati. They knew "the town" in 
their day, and pleased its very easily pleased 
taste. The short-lived literary magazines of the 
eighteen-forties gave them their hour of glory. 
As representatives of passing phases of the liter- 
ary history of New York their careers are not with- 
out sentimental interest, but few of them spoke to 
or for the country as a whole. Two figures, in- 
deed, stand out in sharp contrast with those habit- 
ual strollers on Broadway and frequenters of 
literary gatherings, though each of them was for a 
while a part of Knickerbocker New York. To all 
appearances they were only two more Bohemians 
like the rest, but the curiosity of the twentieth 



108 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

century sets them apart from their forgotten con- 
temporaries. They are two of the unluckiest — 
and yet luckiest — authors who ever tried to sell 
a manuscript along Broadway. One of them is 
Edgar Allan Poe and the other is Walt Whitman. 
They shall have a chapter to themselves. 

But before turning to that chapter, we must 
look back to New England once more and observe 
the blossoming-time of its ancient commonwealths. 
During the thirty years preceding the Civil War 
New England awoke to a new life of the spirit. 
So varied and rich was her literary productiveness 
in this era that it still remains her greatest period, 
and so completely did New England writers of this 
epoch voice the ideals of the nation that the great 
majority of Americans, even today, regard these 
New Englanders as the truest literary exponents 
of the mind and soul of the United States. We 
must take a look at them. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 

To understand the literary leadership of New 
England during the thirty years immediately 
preceding the Civil War it is necessary to recall the 
characteristics of a somewhat isolated and pecu- 
liar people. The mental and moral traits of the 
New England colonists, already glanced at in an 
earlier chapter, had suffered little essential modifi- 
cation in two hundred years. The original racial 
stock was still dominant. As compared with the 
middle and southern colonies, there was relatively 
little immigration, and this was easily assimilated. 
The physical remoteness of New England from 
other sections of the country, and the stubborn 
loyalty with which its inhabitants maintained 
their own standards of life, alike contributed to 
their sense of separateness. It is true, of course, 
that their mode of thinking and feeling had under- 
gone certain changes. They were among the 

109 



110 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

earliest theorists of political independence from 
Great Britain, and had done their share, and more, 
in the Revolution. The rigors of their early creed 
had somewhat relaxed, as we have seen, by the 
end of the seventeenth century, and throughout the 
eighteenth there was a gradual progress toward 
religious liberalism. The population steadily in- 
creased, and New England's unremitting struggle 
with a not too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the 
seas, and her keenness in trade, became proverbial 
throughout the country. Her seaport towns were 
wealthy. The general standards of living re- 
mained frugal, but extreme poverty was rare. 
Her people still made, as in the earliest days of 
the colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices 
for education, and her chief seats of learning. 
Harvard and Yale, remained the foremost educa- 
tional centers of America. But there was still 
scant leisure for the quest of beauty, and slender 
material reward for any practitioner of the fine 
arts. Oratory alone, among the arts of expression, 
commanded popular interest and applause. Dan- 
iel Webster's audiences at Plymouth in 1820 and 
at Bunker Hill in 1825 were not inferior to similar 
audiences of today in intelligence and in respon- 
siveness. Perhaps they were superior. Appreci- 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 111 

ation of the spoken word was natural to men 
trained by generations of thoughtful listening to 
"painful" preaching and by participation in the 
discussions of town-meeting. Yet appreciation 
of secular literature was rare, and interest in the 
other arts was almost non-existent. 

Then, beginning in the eighteen-twenties, and 
developing rapidly after 1830, came a change, a 
change so startling as to warrant the term of " the 
Renascence of New England." No single cause is 
sufficient to account for this "new birth. " It is a 
good illustration of that law of "tension and re- 
lease," which the late Professor Shaler liked to 
demonstrate in all organic life. A long period of 
strain was followed by an age of expansion, free- 
dom, release of energy. As far as the mental life 
of New England was concerned, something of the 
new stimulus was due directly to the influence of 
Europe. Just as the wandering scholars from 
Italy had brought the New Learning, which was a 
revival of the old learning, into England in the 
sixteenth century, so now young New England 
college men like Edward Everett and George Tick- 
nor brought home from the Continent the riches 
of German and French scholarship. Emerson's 
description of the impression made by Everett's 



112 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

lectures in 1820, after his return from Germany, 
gives a vivid picture of the new thirst for foreign 
culture. The North American Review and other 
periodicals, while persistently urging the need of a 
distinctively national literature, insisted also upon 
the value of a deeper knowledge of the literature of 
the Continent. This was the burden of Channing's 
once famous article on A National Literature in 
1823: it was a plea for an independent American 
school of writers, but these writers should know the 
best that Europe had to teach. 

The purely literary movement was connected, 
as the great name of Channing suggests, with a 
new sense of freedom in philosophy and religion. 
Calvinism had mainly done its work in New Eng- 
land. It had bred an extraordinary type of men 
and women, it had helped to lay some of the per- 
manent foundations of our democracy, and it was 
still destined to have a long life in the new West 
and in the South. But in that stern section of the 
country where its influence had been most marked 
there was now an increasingly sharp reaction 
against its determinism and its pessimism. Early 
in the nineteenth century the most ancient and 
influential churches in Boston and the leading 
professors at Harvard had accepted the new form 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 113 

of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. 
The movement spread throughout Eastern Massa- 
chusetts and made its way to other States. Or- 
thodox and liberal Congregational churches split 
apart, and when Channing preached the ordina- 
tion sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, 
the word Unitarian, accepted by the liberals with 
some misgiving, became the recognized motto 
of the new creed. It is only with its literary 
influence that we are here concerned, yet that 
literary influence became so potent that there is 
scarcely a New England writer of the first rank, 
from Bryant onward, who remained untouched 
by it. 

The most interesting and peculiar phase of the 
new liberalism has little directly to do with the 
specific tenets of theological Unitarianism, and in 
fact marked a revolt against the more prosaic and 
conventional pattern of English and American 
Unitarian thought. But this movement, known 
as Transcendentalism, would have been impossible 
without a preliminary and liberalizing stirring of 
the soil. It was a fascinating moment of release 
for some of the most brilliant and radical minds of 
New England. Its foremost representative in our 
literature was Ralph Waldo Emerson, as its chief 



\ 

114 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

exponents in England were Coleridge and Carlyle. 
We must understand its meaning if we would per- 
ceive the quality of much of the most noble and 
beautiful writing produced in New England during 
the Golden Age. 

What then is the significance of the word Tran- 
scendental? Disregarding for the moment the 
technical development of this term as used by 
German and English philosophers, it meant for 
Emerson and his friends simply this: whatever 
transcends or goes beyond the experience of the 
senses. It stressed intuition rather than sensa- 
tion, direct perception of ultimate truth rather 
than the processes of logic. It believed in man's 
ability to apprehend the absolute ideas of Truth, 
Rectitude, Goodness. It resembled the Inner 
Light of the Quaker, though the Quaker traced 
this to a supernatural illumination of the Holy 
Spirit, while the Transcendentalist believed that a 
vision of the eternal realities was a natural en- 
dowment of the human mind. It had only to be 
trusted. Stated in this form, it is evident that 
we have here a very ancient doctrine, well known 
in the literature of India and of Greece. It has 
been held by countless persons who have never 
heard of the word Transcendentalism. We need 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 115 

go no further back than Alexander Pope, a Roman 
Catholic, whom we find declaring: "I am so cer- 
tain of the soul's being immortal that I seem to 
feel it within me, as it were by intuition. " Pope's 
friend Swift, a dean of the Church of England and 
assuredly no Transcendentalist, defined vision as 
seeing the things that are invisible. 

Now turn to some of the New England men. 
Dr. C. A. Bartol, a disciple of Emerson, maintained 
that "the mistake is to make the everlasting things 
subjects of argument instead of sight. " Theodore 
Parker declared to his congregation: 

From the primitive facts of consciousness given by the 
power of instinctive intuition, I endeavored to deduce 
the true notion of God, of justice and futurity. ... I 
found most help in the works of Immanuel Kant, one 
of the profoundest thinkers of the world, though one 
of the worst writers, even in Germany; if he did not 
always furnish conclusions I could rest in, he yet gave 
me the true method, and put me on the right road. I 
found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Na- 
ture, which depend on no logical process of demonstra- 
tion, but are rather facts of consciousness given by 
the instinctive action of human nature itself. I will 
mention only the three most important which per- 
tain to Religion. 1. The Instinctive Intuition of the 
Divine, the consciousness that there is a God. £. 
The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a 
consciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent 



116 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

of our will, which we ought to keep. 3. The In- 
stinctive Intuition of the Immortal, a consciousness 
that the Essential Element of man, the principle of 
Individuality, never dies. 

This passage dates from 1859, and readers of 
Bergson may like to compare it with the contem- 
porary Frenchman's saying: "The analytical facul- 
ties can give us no realities. " 

Let us next hear Emerson himself, first in an 
early letter to his brother Edward: "Do you 
draw the distinction of Milton, Coleridge, and the 
Germans between Reason and Understanding.'' I 
think it a philosophy itself, and, like all truth, very 
practical. Reason is the highest faculty of the soul, 
what we mean often by the soul itself: it never rea- 
sons, never proves, it simply perceives, it is vision. 
The understanding toils all the time, compares, 
contrives, adds, argues; near-sighted, but strong- 
sighted, dwelling in the present, the expedient, the 
customary." And in 1833, after he had left the 
Unitarian pulpit, Emerson made in his diary this 
curious attempt to reconcile the scriptural lan- 
guage of his ancestral profession to the new vocab- 
ulary of Transcendentalism: "Jesus Christ was a 
minister of the pure Reason. The beatitudes of 
the Sermon on the Mount are all utterances of the 



Ik- 



:m 







RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
Photograph by Black, Boston. 






Bergson may like to compare i 
poraryFrenchmajii*s saying: **The aiiah 
ties can give us no realities. 

L. xt h^ift»5^Mare^Mi^%.4^^$^rst in an 

to bisJ4#f^ie{QYdf*lcfl[»4gcdU'i "Do you 
xinction of M'- . ; ' ■?^v,^dthe 
uans between Reas; r? T 

li.inkis a philosophy itseU, :, 
practice n is the highest 

what we lueaii often by the souJ 
sons, never proves, it simply per-jtivt^t, n ts vision. 
The understanding toils all the time, . compares, 
contrives, adds, argues; near-sighted, but stroni?- 
sighted, dwelling in the present, the ex|:> 
ad in V 
'" lersoh iiiucte m iiio dia 





'.ij l'fX:< 


"■'■ • •—*•■■ ^ ;j^Jj^ 




■^tral Tvi 


. /ocab- 

iist was a 

The beatitudes of 


tne ^rv;r moa on * 




e aO utterances of th« 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 117 

mind contemning the phenomenal world. . . . 
The understanding can make nothing of it. 'Tis 
all nonsense. The Reason affirms its absolute 
verity. ... St. Paul marks the distinction 
by the terms natural man and spiritual man. 
When Novalis says, 'It is the instinct of the Un- 
derstanding to contradict the Reason,' he only 
translates into a scientific formula the doctrine of 
St. Paul, 'The Carnal Mind is enmity against 
God.'" 

One more quotation must suffice. It is from a 
poem by a forgotten Transcendentalist, F. G. 
Tuckerman. 

No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead; 
But, leaving straining thought and stammering word. 
Across the barren azure pass to God; 
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird — 
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed! 

It is obvious that this "contemning the phe- 
nomenal world," this "revulsion against the 
intellect as the sole source of truth," is highly dan- 
gerous to second-class minds. If one habitually 
prints the words Insight, Instinct, Intuition, Con- 
sciousness with capitals, and relegates equally 
useful words hke senses, experience, fact, logic to 
lower-case type, one may do it because he is a 



118 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Carlyle or an Emerson, but the chances are that 
he is neither. Transcendentalism, like all ideal- 
istic movements, had its "lunatic fringe,'* its 
camp-followers of excitable, unstable visionaries. 
The very name, like the name Methodist, was 
probably bestowed upon it in mockery, and this 
whole perturbation of staid New England had its 
humorous side. Witness the career of Bronson 
Alcott. It is also true that the glorious affirma- 
tions of these seers can be neither proved nor dis- 
proved. They made no examination and they 
sought no validation of consciousness. An ex- 
plorer in search of the North Pole must bring back 
proofs of his journey, but when a Transcendental- 
ist affirms that he has reached the far heights of 
human experience and even caught sight of the 
gods sitting on their thrones, you and I are obliged 
to take his word for it. Sometimes we hear such 
a man gladly, but it depends upon the man, not 
upon the trustworthiness of the method. Finally 
it should be observed that the Transcendental 
movement was an exceedingly complex one, being 
I both literary, philosophic, and religious; related 
also to the subtle thought of the Orient, to 
mediaeval mysticism, and to the English Plato- 
nists; touched throughout by the French Revolu- 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 119 

tionary theories, by the Romantic spirit, by the 
new zeal for science and pseudo-science, and by 
the imrest of a fermenting age. 

Our present concern is with the impact of this 
cosmopolitan current upon the mind and character 
of a few New England writers. Channing and 
Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Alcott, 
Thoreau and Emerson, are all representative of the 
best thought and the noblest ethical impulses of 
their generation. Let us choose first the greatest 
name : a sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one 
of the very Sun-Gods. 

The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment 
in the village library to study French's statue of 
Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On 
one side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but 
seen from the other side it is the countenance of a 
seer, a world's man. This contrast between the 
parochial Emerson and the greater Emerson inter- 
prets many a puzzle in his career. Half a mile 
beyond the village green to the north, close to the 
*'rude bridge" of the famous Concord fight in 
1775, is the Old Manse, once tenanted and de- 
scribed by Hawthorne. It was built by Emerson's 
grandfather, a patriot chaplain in the Revolution, 
who died of camp-fever at Ticonderoga. His 



120 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

widow married Dr. Ezra Ripley, and here Ralph 
Waldo Emerson and his brothers passed many a 
summer in their childhood. Half a mile east of 
the village, on the Cambridge turnpike, is Emer- 
son's own house, still sheltered by the pines which 
Thoreau helped him to plant in 1838. Within 
the house everything is unchanged: here are 
the worn books, pen and inkstand, the favorite 
pictures upon the wall. Over the ridge to the 
north lies the Sleepy Hollow cemetery where the 
poet rests, with the gravestones of Hawthorne 
and the Alcotts, Thoreau and William James 
[close by. 

But although Concord is the Emerson shrine, 
he was born in Boston, in 1803. His father, named 
William like the grandfather, was also, like the 
Emerson ancestors for many generations, a clergy- 
man — eloquent, liberal, fond of books and music, 
highly honored by his alma mater Harvard and by 
the town of Boston, where he ministered to the 
First Church. His premature death in 1811 left 
his widow with five sons — one of them feeble- 
minded — and a daughter to struggle hard with 
poverty. With her husband's sister, the Calvin- 
istic "Aunt Mary Moody" Emerson, she held, 
however, that these orphaned boys had been 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 121 

"born to be educated. " And educated the "eager 
blushing boys" were, at the Boston Latin School 
and at Harvard College, on a regimen of "toil 
and want and truth and mutual faith." There 
are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. 
Ralph was thought less persistent than his steady 
older brother William, and far less brilliant than 
his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward 
and Charles. He had an undistinguished career^ 
at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1821,; 
ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers 
of irony like to remember that he was the seventh 
choice of his classmates for the position of class 
poet. After some desultory teaching to help his 
brothers, he passed irregularly through the Di- 
vinity School, his studies often interrupted by se- 
rious ill-health. "If they had examined me," he 
said afterward of the kindly professors in the 
Divinity School, "they never would have passed 
me." But approve him they did, in 1826, and 
he entered decorously upon the profession of his 
ancestors, as associate minister of the vSecond 
Church in Boston. His Journals, which are a 
priceless record of his inner life, at this and later 
periods, reveal the rigid self-scrutiny, the tender 
idealism, with which he began his ministerial career. 



122 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

But as a scheme of life for Ralph Waldo Emerson 
this vocation would not satisfy. The sexton of 
the Second Church thought that the young man 
was not at his best at funerals. Father Taylor, 
the eccentric Methodist, whom Emerson assisted 
at a sailor's Bethel near Long Wharf, considered 
him "one of the sweetest souls God ever made," 
but as ignorant of the principles of the New Testa- 
ment as Balaam's ass was of Hebrew grammar. 
By and by came an open difference with his con- 
gregation over the question of administering the 
Communion. "I am not interested in it," Emer- 
son admitted, and he wrote in his Journal the 
noble words: "It is my desire, in the office of a 
Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot 
do with my whole heart." His resignation was 
accepted in 1832. His young wife had died of con- 
sumption in the same year. He now sailed for 
Italy, France, and England, a memorable journey 
which gave him an acquaintance with Landor, 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle, but which 
was even more significant in sending him, as he 
says, back to himself, to the resources of his own 
nature. "When shows break up," wrote Whit- 
man afterward, "what but oneself is sure?" In 
1834 and 1835 we find Emerson occupying a room 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 123 

in the Old Manse at Concord, strolling in the quiet 
fields, lecturing or preaching if he were invited to 
do so, but chiefly absorbed in a little book which he 
was beginning to write — a new utterance of a new 
man. 

This book, the now famous Nature of 1836, con- 
tains the essence of Emerson's message to his 
generation. It is a prose essay, but written in the ! 
ecstatic mood of a poet. The theme of its medita- 
tion is the soul as related to Nature and to God. 
The soul is primal; Nature, in all its bountiful and 
beautiful commodities, exists for the training of the 
soul; it is the soul's shadow. And every soul has 
immediate access to Deity. Thus the utility and 
beauty and discipline of Nature lift the soul God- 
ward. The typical sentence of the book is this: 
"The sun shines today also"; that is to say: the 
world is still alive and fair; let us lift up our hearts! 
Only a few Americans of 1836 bought this singular 
volume, but Emerson went serenely forward. He 
had found his path. 

In 1837 he delivered the well-known Phi Beta 
Kappa oration at Harvard on The American 
Scholar. Emerson was now thirty -four; he had 
married a second time, had bought a house of his 
own in Concord, and purposed to make a living by 



124 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

lecturing and writing. His address in Cambridge, 
though it contained no reference to himself, was 
after all a justification of the way of life he had 
chosen: a declaration of intellectual independence 
for himself and his countrymen, an exhortation of 
self -trust to the individual thinking man. "If 
the single man plant himself indomitably on his 
instincts and there abide, the huge world will come 
round to him. " Such advice to cut loose from the 
moorings of the past was not unknown in Phi Beta 
Kappa orations, though it had never been so bril- 
liantly phrased; but when Emerson applied pre- 
cisely the same doctrine, in 1838, to the graduating 
class at the Harvard Divinity School, he roused a 
storm of disapproval. "A tempest in our wash- 
bowl," he wrote coolly to Carlyle, but it was more 
than that. The great sentence of the Divinity 
School address, "God is, not was; he speaketh, not 
spake," was the emphasis of a superb rhetorician 
upon the immediacy of the soul's access to God. 
It has been the burden of a thousand prophets in 
all religions. The young priests of the Divinity 
School, their eyes wearied with Hebrew and 
Greek, seem to have enjoyed Emerson's injunction 
to turn away from past records and historical 
authorities and to drink from the living fountain 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 125 

of the divine within themselves; but to the pro- 
fessors, "the stern old war-gods," this relative 
beUttlement of historical Christianity seemed blas- 
phemy. A generation passed before Emerson was 
again welcomed by his alma mater. 

The reader who has mastered those three utter- 
ances by the Concord Transcendentalist in 1836, 
1837, and 1838 has the key to Emerson. He was < 
a seer, not a system-maker. The constitution of 
his mind forbade formal, consecutive, logical 
thought. He was not a philosopher in the ac- 
cepted sense, though he was always philosophizing, 
nor a metaphysician in spite of his curious search- 
ings in the realm of metaphysics. He sauntered 
in books as he sauntered by Walden Pond, in 
quest of what interested him; he "fished in Mon- 
taigne, " he said, as he fished in Plato and Goethe. 
He basketed the day's luck, good or bad as it might 
be, into the pages of his private Journal, which he 
called his savings-bank, because from this source 
he drew most of the material for his books. The 
Journal has recently been printed, in ten volumes. 
No American writing rewards the reader more 
richly. It must be remembered that Emerson's 
Essays, the first volume of which appeared in 1841, 
and the last volumes after his death in 1882, re- 



126 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

present practically three stages of composition: 
first the detached thoughts of the Journal; second, 
the rearrangement of this material for use upon the 
lecture platform; and finally, the essays in their 
present form. The oral method thus predominates : 
a series of oracular thoughts has been shaped for 
oratorical utterance, not oratorical in the bom- 
bastic, popular American sense, but cunningly 
designed, by a master of rhetoric, to capture the 
ear and then the mind of the auditor. 

Emerson's work as a lecturer coincided with the 
rise of that Lyceum system which brought most of 
the American authors, for more than a generation, 
into intimate contact with the public, and which 
proved an important factor in the aesthetic and 
moral cultivation of our people. No lecturer 
could have had a more auspicious influence than 
Emerson, with his quiet dignity, his serene spiritual 
presence, his tonic and often electrifying force. 
But if he gave his audiences precious gifts, he also 
learned much from them. For thirty years his 
lecturing trips to the West brought him, more 
widely than any New England man of letters, 
into contact with the new, virile America of the 
great Mississippi valley. Unlike many of his 
friends, he was not repelled by the " Jacksonism oH 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 127 

the West"; he rated it a wholesome, vivifying force 
in our national thought and life. The Journal 
reveals the essential soundness of his Americanism. 
Though surrounded all his life by reformers, he 
was himself scarcely a reformer, save upon the 
single issue of anti-slavery. Perhaps he was at 
bottom too much of a radical to be swept off his 
feet by any reform. 

To our generation, of course, Emerson presents 
himself as an author of books, and primarily as 
an essayist, rather than as a winning, entrancing 
speaker. His essays have a greater variety of tone 
than is commonly recognized. Many of them, like 
Manners, Farming, Books, Eloquence, Old Age, ex- 
hibit a shrewd prudential wisdom, a sort of Yankee 
instinct for "the milk in the pan," that reminds 
one of Ben Franklin. Like most of the greater 
New England writers, he could be, on occasion, an 
admirable local historian. See his essays on Life 
and Letters in New England, New England Reform- 
ers, Politics, and the successive entries in his 
Journal relating to Daniel Webster. He had the 
happiest gift of portraiture, as is witnessed by his 
sketches of Montaigne, of Napoleon, of Socrates 
(in the essay on Plato), of his aunt Mary Moody 
Emerson, of Thoreau, and of various types of 



128 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Englishmen in his English Traits. But the great 
essays, no doubt, are those like Self-Reliance, 
Compensation, The Over-Soul, Fate, Power, Culture, 
Worship, and Illusions. These will puzzle no one 
who has read carefully that first book on Nature. 
They all preach the gospel of intuition, instinctive 
trust in the Universe, faith in the ecstatic moment 
of vision into the things that are unseen by the 
physical eye. Self-reliance, as Emerson's son 
has pointed out, means really God-reliance; the 
Over-Soul — always a stumbling-block to Philis- 
tines — means that high spiritual life into which 
all men may enter and in which they share the 
life of Deity. Emerson is stern enough in ex- 
pounding the laws of compensation that run 
through the universe, but to him the chief law is 
the law of the ever-ascending, victorious soul. 

This radiant optimism permeates his poems. 
By temperament a singer as well as a seer and 
sayer, Emerson was nevertheless deficient in the 
singing voice. He composed no one great poem, 
his verse presents no ideas that are not found in his 
prose. In metre and rhyme he is harsh and willful. 
Yet he has marvelous single phrases and cadences. 
He ejaculates transports and ecstasies, and though 
he cannot organize and construct in verse, he is 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 129 

capable here and there of the true miracle of 
transforming fact and thought into true beauty. 
Aldrich used to say that he would rather have 
written Emerson's Bacchus than any American 
poem. 

That the pure, high, and tonic mind of Emerson 
was universal in its survey of human forces, no 
one would claim. Certain limitations in interest 
and sympathy are obvious. "That horrid burden 
and impediment of the soul which the churches call 
sin," to use John Morley's words, occupied his 
attention but little. Like a mountain climber in a 
perilous pass, he preferred to look up rather than 
down. He does not stress particularly those old 
human words, service and sacrifice. "Anti-scien- 
tific, anti-social, anti-Christian" are the terms ap- 
plied to him by one of his most penetrating critics. 
Yet I should prefer to say "un-scientific," "un- 
social," and "non-Christian," in the sense in which 
Plato and Isaiah are non-Christian. Perhaps it 
would be still nearer the truth to say, as Mrs. 
Lincoln said of her husband, "He was not a tech- 
nical Christian." He tends to underestimate 
institutions of every kind; history, except as a store- 
house of anecdote, and culture as a steady mental 
discipline. This is the price he pays for his tran- 



130 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

scendental insistence upon the supreme value of the 
Now, the moment of insight. But after all these 
limitations are properly set down, the personality 
of Ralph Waldo Emerson remains a priceless pos- 
session to his countrymen. The austere serenity 
of his life, and the perfection with which he repre- 
sents the highest type of his province and his era, 
will ultimately become blended with the thought 
of his true Americanism. A democrat and libera- 
tor, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like Lin- 
coln to become increasingly a world's figure, a 
friend and guide to aspiring spirits everywhere. 
Differences of race and creed are negligible in the 
presence of such superb confidence in God and the 
soul. 

Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that 
Henry Thoreau, the eccentric bachelor, had just 
died of consumption in his mother's house on Main 
Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled 
cannily at the notion that after fifty years their 
townsman's literary works would be published in a 
sumptuous twenty-volume edition, and that critics 
in his own country and in Europe would rank him 
with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that is precisely 
what has happened. Our literature has no more 
curious story than the evolution of this local crank 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 131 

into his rightful place of mastership. In his life- 
time he printed only two books, A Week on the 
Concord and Merrimac Rivers — which was even 
more completely neglected by the public than 
Emerson's Nature — and Walden, now one of the 
classics, but only beginning to be talked about 
when its shy, proud author penned his last line 
and died with the words "moose" and "Indian" 
on his lips. 

Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the 
surface of human life, means many different things 
to men of various temperaments. Collectors of hu- 
man novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his unique- 
ness of flavor; critics, like Lowell, place him, not 
without impatient rigor. To some readers he is 
primarily a naturalist, an observer, of the White 
of Selborne school; to others an elemental man, a 
lover of the wild, a hermit of the woods. He has 
been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate that his 
powers of observation were accompanied, like 
Wordsworth's, by a gift of emotional interpreta- 
tion of the meaning of phenomena. Lovers of 
literature celebrate his sheer force and penetration 
of phrase. But to the student of American 
thought Thoreau's prime value lies in the courage 
and consistency with which he endeavored to 



132 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

realize the gospel of Transcendentalism in his 
own inner life. 

Lovers of racial traits like to remember that 
Thoreau's grandfather was an immigrant French- 
man from the island of Jersey, and that his grand- 
mother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made 
lead pencils and ground plumbago in his own house 
in Concord. The mother was from New Hamp- 
shire. It was a high-minded family. All the 
four children taught school and were good talkers. 
Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized by good 
Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and 
Latin, and was graduated at Harvard in 1837, the 
year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. 
Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. 
"Cold and unimpressible, " wrote a classmate. 
" The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent. 
He did not care for people." "An unfavorable 
opinion has been entertained of his disposition to 
exert himself," wrote President Quincy confi- 
dentially to Emerson in 1837, although the kindly 
President, a year later, in recommending Thoreau as 
a school-teacher, certified that "his rank was high 
as a scholar in all the branches and his morals and 
general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary. " 

Ten years passed. The young man gave up 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 13S 

school-keeping, thinking it a loss of time. He 
learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, 
and found that by manual labor for six weeks in the 
year he could meet all the expenses of living. He 
haunted the woods and pastures, explored rivers 
and ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's 
wood-lot with the famous axe borrowed from Al- 
cott, was put in jail for refusal to pay his poll- 
tax, and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" 
from social obligations. "I, Henry D. Thoreau, 
have signed off, and do not hold myself respon- 
sible to your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil 
Government." When his college class held its 
tenth reunion in 1847, and each man was asked 
to send to the secretary a record of achievement, 
Thoreau wrote: "My steadiest employment, if 
such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of 
my condition and ready for whatever may turn 
up in heaven or on earth. " There is the motto of 
Transcendentalism, stamped upon a single coin. 

For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is 
Thoreau's racier, homelier version of Emerson's 
"endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than 
Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon 
the quest. The elder man had announced the 
programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost 



134 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

what Thoreau would call a "committed man," 
with family and household responsibilities, with 
a living to earn, and bound, like every professional 
writer and speaker, to have some measure of 
regard for his public. But Thoreau was ready to 
travel lightly and alone. If he should fail in the 
great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his 
own affair. He had no intimates, no confidant 
save the multitudinous pages of his Journal, from 
which — and here again he followed Emerson's 
example — his future books were to be compiled. 
Many of his most loyal admirers will admit that 
such a quest is bound, by the very conditions of the 
problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it 
in Ethan Brand, and his quaint illustration of the 
folly of romantic expansion of the self apart from 
the common interests of human kind is the pic- 
ture of a dog chasing its own tail. "It is time now 
that I begin to live, " notes Thoreau in the Journal, 
and he continued to say it in a hundred different 
ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he 
never quite captured the fugitive felicity. The 
haunting pathos of his own allegory has moved 
every reader of W olden: "I long ago lost a hound, a 
bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their 
trail. '* Precisely what he meant it is now impos- 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 

Engraving in the Old State House, Boston. 



HEXRY D. THOREAU 
From a wood engraving. 



THEODORE PARKER 

Engraving by Allen and Ilorton. 



134 

ig to wt! r. and buuiid, iikt : • 

. .«.d lor his p€fcM '^«B#?JSl(^iS# wssiM^ew^ tv, 
travel lightly and alone. If he should fail in the 
great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was L 
own affair. He had no intimates, no confidaiis 
save the multitudinous pages of his Journal, from 

he followed Emerson's 



ill Ethan Brand, anu m 
folly of romantic expaSSfHSJi'eP'tait^^nei^^part irom 
the common , interests of human kind is the pic- 
ture of a dog chasing its own tail. "It is time now 
Ihat I begin to live, '* notes Thoreau in the Jr 
md he continued to say it i 
until the end of all hi 

■ ' ■' ' The 

. moved 

I hound, a 

i still on thei^ 

trail. ^^^^^^^^^^^^IPnow impos- 

.no+ioll f)nij fwff A y/f j.niviji§n?I 



I 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 135 

sible to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in the 
ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He 
bends doggedly to the trail, for Henry Thoreau is 
no quitter, but the trail leads nowhere, and in the 
latest volumes of the Journals he seems to realize 
that he has been pursuing a phantom. He dived 
fearlessly and deep into himself, but somehow he 
failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all 
the transcendental prophets assured him was to be 
had at the cost of diving. 

This is not to say that this austere and strenu- 
ous athlete came up quite empty-handed. Far 
from it. The by-products of his toil were enough 
to have enriched many lesser men, and they have 
given Thoreau a secure fame. From his boyhood he 
longed to make himself a writer, and an admirable 
writer he became. "For a long time," he says in 
Walden, "I was reporter to a journal, of no very 
wide circulation, whose editor has never seen fit 
to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is 
too common with writers, I got only my labor for 
my pains. However, in this case my pains were 
their reward." Like so many solitaries, he ex- 
perienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort 
in composition, and he was artist enough to know 
that his pages, carefully assembled from his note- 



136 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man 
of his day, not even Lowell the "last of the book- 
men, " abandoned himself more unreservedly to the 
delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished 
scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his 
translations attest. He had some acquaintance 
with several modern languages, and at one time 
possessed the best collection of books on Oriental 
literature to be found in America. He was 
drenched in the English poetry of the seventeenth 
century. His critical essays in the Dial, his 
letters and the bookish allusions throughout his 
writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the 
records of the past. He left some three thousand 
manuscript pages of notes on the American In- 
dians, whose history and character had fascinated 
him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies 
gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had 
deep delight in his life-long studies in natural 
history, in his meticulous measurements of river 
currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering 
of plants and the migration of birds. The more 
thoroughly trained naturalists of our own day de- 
tect him now and again in error as to his birds and 
plants, just as specialists in Maine woodcraft 
discover that he made amusing, and for him un- 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 137 

accountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. 
But if he was not impeccable as a naturalist or 
woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of his 
enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever stimu- 
lated as many men and women in the happy use of 
their eyes? He would have had slight patience 
with much of the sentimental nature study of our 
generation, and certainly an intellectual contempt 
for much that we read and write about the call of 
the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his 
infection for the freedom of the woods, for the 
stark and elemental in nature. Thoreau's passion 
for this aspect of life may have been selfish, wolf- 
like, but it is still communicative. 

Once, toward the close of his too brief life, 
Thoreau "signed on" again to an American ideal, 
and no man could have signed more nobly. It was 
the cause of Freedom, as represented by John 
Brown of Harper's Ferry. The French and Scotch 
blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. 
Instead of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil 
chaos called Civil Government," Thoreau chal- 
lenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown 
down the gauntlet in Slavery in Massachusetts, 
which Garrison had published in the Liberator in 
1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the 



138 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into 
a complete citizen, arguing the case and glorifying 
to his neighbors the dead hero. "It seems as if 
no man had ever died in America before; for in 
order to die you must first have lived. ... I 
hear a good many pretend that they are going to 
die. . . . Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. 
They haven't got life enough in them. They'll 
deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists 
mopping the spot where they left off. Only half 
a dozen or so have died since the world began." 
Such passages as this reveal a very different Thor- 
eau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have 
spent his days in the company of swamp-black- 
birds and woodchucks. He had, in fact, one of the 
highest qualifications for human society, an abso- 
lute honesty of mind. "We select granite," he 
says, "for the underpinning of our houses and 
barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not our- 
selves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the 
lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten .... 
In proportion as our inward life fails, we go 
more constantly and desperately to the post- 
office. You may depend upon it, that the 
poor fellow who walks away with the great- 
est number of letters, proud of his extensive 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 139 

correspondence, has not heard from himself this 
long time." 

This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau 
the foundation of all enduring social relations, and 
the dullest observer of twentieth century America 
can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much 
as ever. His sharp-edged personality provokes 
curiosity and pricks the reader into dissent or emu- 
lation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value 
to our generation lies in the fact that here was a 
Transcendentalist who stressed, not the life of the 
senses, though he was well aware of their seductive- 
ness, but the stubborn energy of the will. 

The scope of the present book prevents more 
than a glimpse at the other members of the New 
England Transcendental group. They are a very 
mixed company, noble, whimsical, queer, impos- 
sible. "The good Alcott," wrote Carlyle, "with 
his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn 
temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving 
the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; 
he comes before one like a venerable Don Quixote, 
whom nobody can laugh at without loving." 
These words paint a whole company, as well as a 
single man. The good Alcott still awaits an ade- 
quate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler 



140 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

in the South, school-teacher in Boston and else- 
where, he descended upon Concord, flitted to the 
queer community of Fruitlands, was starved back 
to Concord, inspired and bored the patient Emer- 
son, talked endlessly, wrote ineffective books, and 
had at last his apotheosis in the Concord School of 
Philosophy, but was chiefly known for the twenty 
years before his death in 1888 as the father of 
the Louisa Alcott who wrote Little Women. "A 
tedious archangel," was Emerson's verdict, and 
it is likely to stand. 

Margaret Fuller, though sketched by Hawthorne, 
analyzed by Emerson, and painted at full length 
by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, is now a fading 
figure — a remarkable woman, no doubt, one of the 
first of American feminists, suggesting George 
Eliot in her physical unattractiveness, her clear 
brain, her touch of sensuousness. She was an 
early-ripe, over-crammed scholar in the classics 
and in modern European languages. She did 
loyal, unpaid work as the editor of the Dial, which 
from 1840 to 1844 was the organ of Transcenden- 
talism. She joined the community at Brook Farm, 
whose story has been so well told by Lindsay 
Swift. For a while she served as literary editor 
of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley. 



THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS 141 

Then she went abroad, touched Rousseau's 
manuscripts at Paris with trembling, adoring 
fingers, made a secret marriage in Italy with the 
young Marquis Ossoli, and perished by shipwreck, 
with her husband and child, off Fire Island in 1850. 

Theodore Parker, like Alcott and "Margaret," 
an admirable Greek scholar, an idealist and re- 
former, still lives in Chadwick's biography, in 
Colonel Higginson's delightful essay, and in the 
memories of a few liberal Bostonians who remem- 
ber his tremendous sermons on the platform of the 
old Music Hall. He was a Lexington farmer's 
son, with the temperament of a blacksmith, with 
enormous, restless energy, a good hater, a passion- 
ate lover of all excellent things save meekness. 
He died at fifty, worn out, in Italy. 

But while these three figures were, after Emer- 
son and Thoreau, the most representative of the 
group, the student of the Transcendental period 
will be equally interested in watching its influence 
upon many other types of young men: upon 
future journalists and publicists like George Wil- 
liam Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; 
upon religionists like Orestes Brownson, Father 
Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon 
poets like Jones Very, Christopher P. Cranch, and 



142 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Ellery Channing. There was a sunny side of the 
whole movement, as T. W. Higginson and F. B. 
Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, 
loved to emphasize in their talk and in their 
books; and it was shadowed also by tragedy and 
the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one 
looks back at it, in the perspective of three- 
quarters of a century, it seems chiefly something 
touchingly fine. For all these men and women 
tried to hitch their wagon to a star. 



CHAPTER VII 

ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 

Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, 
in that great generation preceding the Civil War, 
were a company of other men — romancers, poets, 
essayists, historians — who shared in the intellec- 
tual liberalism of the age, but who were more 
purely artists in prose and verse than they were 
seekers after the unattainable. Hawthorne, for 
example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm 
with some of the most extreme types of transcen- 
dental extravagance. The movement interested 
him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, 
but personally he maintained an attitude of cool 
detachment from it. Longfellow was too much of 
an artist to lose his head over philosophical ab- 
stractions ; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine 
poetic instinct for the concrete; and Lowell and 
Holmes had the saving gift of humor. Culti- 
vated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and 

143 



144 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Parkman preferred to keep their feet on the solid 
earth and write admirable histories. So the 
mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read 
American books were being produced within 
twenty miles of the Boston State House. The 
slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was 
only now and then, as in the enforcement of the 
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was brought 
sharply home to the North. The "golden forties " 
were as truly golden for New England as for idle 
California. There was wealth, leisure, books, a 
glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit 
of the writers is the spirit of youth. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of 
pure romance, was Puritan by inheritance and 
temperament, though not in doctrine or in sym- 
pathy. His literary affiliations were with the 
English and German Romanticists, and he pos- 
sessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabu- 
lary of his transcendental friends. Born in Salem 
in 1804, he was descended from Judge Haw- 
thorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long 
line of sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a mor- 
bid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by a 
physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. 
He read Spenser, Rousseau, and the Newgate Cal- 









NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, mo 

Painting by Charles Osgood. In the possession of Mrs. R. C. 
Manning, Salem, Mass. 




NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 18CyO 

Photograph from a negative taken by Mayall in London, England^ 
In the possession of Mr. Frank Cousins, Salem, Mass. 



144 TT IN I TUBE- 

Parkman prefcrrrd ^n l , the solid 

earth and he 

mellow yeass went by. ' y-read 

•>ooks were bt u 

only now and tteeM, <«sf^3g^^Mif oreeiiieti • 
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was b 
sharply hoc th. The "golden forties** 

wt tnd as fdr idle 



of the w 

Nathaniel Hawthorn 
pure romance, was Puritan by ii 
temperament, though not in doctrine or in sym- 
pathy. His literary affiliations were with the 
English and German Romanticists •■'■'-•-^ ^-^ ^'^«- 
sessed, foT professional use, the ide 
]nrv of his transcendental f' 
is descend 
0&81 .aviaOEt^^a 5aWikHii.yi ,.; a long 



r - ii and beauty. 

He reau , and the Newgate Cal- 




srmMwATntimtitm^SISmmm 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 145 

endar, was graduated at Bowdoin, with Long- 
fellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem 
for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he 
tried to teach himself the art of story-writing. His 
earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays in which 
characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a 
setting for a preconceived "moral"; he is in love 
with allegory and parable. His own words about 
his first collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, 
have often been quoted: "They have the pale tint 
of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade. " 
Yet they are for the most part exquisitely written. 
After a couple of years in the Boston Custom- 
House, and a residence at the socialistic com- 
munity of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the 
happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for 
nearly four years dwelt in the Old Manse at Con- 
cord. He described it in one of the ripest of his 
essays, the Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, 
his second collection of stories. After three years 
in the Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 
1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, 
The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. He was now 
forty-six. In 1851, he published The House of 
the Seven Gables, The Wonder-Booh, and The 
Snow-Image, and Other Tales. In 1852 came The 



146 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Bliihedale Romance, a rich ironical story drawn 
from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in 
the American Consulate at Liverpool and three 
subsequent years of residence upon the Continent 
saw no literary harvest except carefully filled 
notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral 
romance, The Marble Faun. Hawthorne returned 
home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at Con- 
cord, busying himseK with a new, and, as was 
destined, a never completed story about the 
elixir of immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, 
and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He 
rests under the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the 
Alcotts and the Emersons. 

It is difficult for contemporary Americans to 
assess the value of such a man, who evidently did 
nothing except to write a few books. His rare, 
delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing 
events. Not many of his countrymen really love 
his writings, as they love, for instance the writings 
of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone 
reads, at some time of his life. The Scarlet Letter, 
and trembles at its passionate indictment of the 
sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, 
"Be true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest 
memories of Hawthorne's readers, as of Kipling's 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 147 

readers, hover about his charming stories for chil- 
dren; to have missed The Wonder-Booh is like hav- 
ing grown old without ever catching the sweetness 
of the green world at dawn. But our public has 
learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, 
taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, 
sensational, physical style, fit for describing an 
automobile, a department store, a steamship, a 
lynching party. It is the style of our day, and 
judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, 
conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat old- 
fashioned, like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps 
too completely a New Englander to be understood 
by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe 
and Whitman, excited strong interest among 
European minds. 

Yet no American is surer, generation after gen- 
eration, of finding a fit audience. Hawthorne's 
genius was meditative rather than dramatic. 
His artistic material was moral rather than physi- 
cal; he brooded over the soul of man as affected by 
this and that condition and situation. The child 
of a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid 
accuracy the precise circumstances surrounding 
each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of 
his sketches and short stories and most of his 



148 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

romances deal with historical facts, moods, and 
atmospheres, and he knew the past of New Eng- 
land as few men have ever known it. There is 
solid historical and psychological stuff as the 
foundation of his air-castles. His latent radical- 
ism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism 
as he interpreted the moral standards of ancient 
communities; no reader of The Scarlet Letter can 
forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the 
unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own 
judgment upon the deep matters of the human 
conscience was stem enough, but it was a univer- 
salized judgment, and by no means the result of a 
Calvinism which he hated. Over-fond as he was 
in his earlier tales of elaborate, fanciful, decorative 
treatment of themes that promised to point a 
moral, in his finest short stories, such as The Am- 
bitious Guesty The Gentle Boy, Young Goodman 
Brown, The Snow Image, The Great Stone Face, 
Drowne^s Wooden Image, Rappacini*s Daughter, 
the moral, if there be one, is not obtruded. He 
loves physical symbols for mental and moral states, 
and was poet and Transcendentalist enough to 
retain his youthful affection for parables; but his 
true field as a story-teller is the erring, questing, 
aspiring, shadowed human heart. 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 149 

The Scarlet Letter, for instance, is a study of a 
universal theme, the problem of concealed sin, 
punishment, redemption. Only the setting is 
provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, 
it is true, without remembering the Puritan rever- 
ence for physical purity, the Puritan reverence for 
the magistrate-minister — differing so widely from 
the respect of Latin countries for the priest — the 
Puritan preoccupation with the life of the soul, or, 
as more narrowly construed by Calvinism, the 
problem of evil. The word Adultery, although 
suggestively enough present in one of the finest 
symboHcal titles ever devised by a romancer, does 
not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with 
are hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, 
Hester Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth are 
developing, suffering, living creatures, caught 
inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By 
an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne 
exhibits the travail of their souls. In the greatest 
scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in 
the forest, the Puritan framework of the story 
gives way beneath the weight of human passion, 
and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps 
larger solution than was actually worked out by 
the logic of succeeding events. But though the 



150 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

book has been called Christless, prayerless, hope- 
less, no mature person ever reads it without a 
deepened sense of the impotence of all mechanistic 
theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense 
reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke," 
in Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle 
law than can be graven on tables of stone and 
numbered as the Seventh Commandment. 

The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of The 
House of the Seven Gables, which Hawthorne him- 
self was inclined to think a better book than The 
Scarlet Letter. Certainly this story of old Salem 
is impeccably written and its subtle handling of 
tone and atmosphere is beyond dispute. An ances- 
tral curse, the visitation of the sins of the fathers 
upon the children, the gradual decay of a once 
sound stock, are motives that Ibsen might have 
developed. But the Norseman would have failed 
to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his 
shadows, and the no less masterly deftness of the 
ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance through 
the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest 
descendant of the Maules. In The Blithedale 
Romance Hawthorne stood for once, perhaps, too 
near his material to allow the rich atmospheric 
eflFects which he prefers, and in spite of the unfor- 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 151 

getable portrait of Zenobia and powerful passages 
of realistic description, the book is not quite 
focussed. In The Marble Faun Hawthorne comes 
into his own again. Its central problem is one 
of those dark insoluble ones that he loves: the 
influence of a crime upon the development of a 
soul. Donatello, the Faun, is a charming young 
creature of the natural sunshine until his love for 
the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission 
of murder: then begins the growth of his mind and 
character. Perhaps the haunting power of the 
main theme of the book has contributed less to its 
fame than the felicity of its descriptions of Rome 
and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed, like Byron, 
in spite of his defective training in the appreci- 
ation of the arts, a gift of romantic discernment 
which makes The Marble Faun, like Childe Haroldy 
a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City. 

All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a 
central core of psychological romance, and a rich 
surface finish of description. His style, at its 
best, has a subdued splendor of coloring which is 
only less wonderful than the spiritual perceptions 
with which this magician was endowed. The gloom 
which haunts many of his pages, as I have said 
elsewhere, is the long shadow cast by our mortal 



152 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

destiny upon a sensitive soul. Thelnystery is our 
mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely 
endowed mind and heart. The shadow is our 
shadow; the gleams of insight, the soft radiance of 
truth and beauty, are his own. 

A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow summed up the Portland boy*s char- 
acter in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him 
to avoid the unworthy. " Bom in 1807, of May- 
flower stock that had distinguished itself for 
bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated 
from Bowdoin at eighteen. Like his classmate 
Hawthorne, he had been a wide and secretly 
ambitious reader, and had followed the successive 
numbers of Irving's Sketch Booh, he tells us, 
"with ever increasing wonder and delight." His 
college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the 
modern languages, and he spent three happy 
years in Europe in preparation. He taught 
successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and 
for eighteen years, 1836 to 1854, served as George 
Ticknor's successor at Harvard, ultimately sur- 
rendering the chair to Lowell. He early pub- 
lished two prose volumes, Hyperion and Outre-mery 
Irvingesque romances of European travel. Then 
came, after ten years of teaching and the death 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 153 

of his young wife, the sudden impulse to write 
poetry, and he produced, "softly excited, I know 
not why, '* The Reaper and the Flowers, a Psalm of 
Death. From that December morning in 1838 
until his death in 1882 he was Longfellow the 
Poet. 

His outward life, like Hawthorne's, was barren 
of dramatic incident, save the one tragic accident 
by which his second wife, the mother of his chil- 
dren, perished before his eyes in 1861. He bore the 
calamity with the quiet courage of his race and 
breeding. But otherwise his days ran softly 
and gently, enriched with books and friendships, 
sheltered from the storms of circumstance. He 
had leisure to grow ripe, to remember, and to 
dream. But he never secluded himself, like 
Tennyson, from normal contacts with his fellow- 
men. The owner of the Craigie House was a 
good neighbor, approachable and deferential. He 
was even interested in local Cambridge politics. 
On the larger political issues of his day his Ameri- 
canism was sound and loyal. "It is dishearten- 
ing," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, 
"to see how little sympathy there is in the hearts 
of the young men here for freedom and great 
ideas." But his own sympathy never wavered. 



154 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

His linguistic talent helped him to penetrate 
the secrets of alien ways of thought and speech. 
He understood Italy and Spain, Holland and 
France and Germany. He had studied them on 
the lips of their living men and women and in 
the books where soldier and historian, priest and 
poet, had inscribed the record of five hundred 
years. From the Revival of Learning to the mid- 
dle of the nineteenth century, Longfellow knew 
the soul of Europe as few men have known it, and 
he helped to translate Europe to America. His 
intellectual receptivity, his quick eye for color 
and costume and landscape, his ear for folk-lore 
and ballad, his own ripe mastery of words, made 
him the most resourceful of international inter- 
preters. And this lover of children, walking in 
quiet ways, this refined and courteous host and 
gentleman, scholar and poet, exemplified without 
self-advertisement the richer qualities of his own 
people. When Couper's statue of Longfellow 
was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie 
said: "His freedom from the sophistication of a 
more experienced country; his simplicity, due in 
large measure to the absence of social self-con- 
sciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, 
which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 155 

happy and confident expectation, born of a sense 
of tremendous national vitality; his love of simple 
things in normal relations to world-wide interests 
of the mind; his courage in interpreting those 
deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art 
but who do not know life call commonplaces; 
the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his 
spirit — these are the delicate flowers of our new 
world, and as much a part of it as its stretches of 
wilderness and the continental roll of its rivers." 
Longfellow's poetic service to his countrymen 
has thus become a national asset, and not merely 
because in his three best known narrative poems, 
Evangeline, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles 
Standish, he selected his themes from our own 
history. The Building of the Ship, written with full 
faith in the troubled year of 1849, is a national 
anthem. "It is a wonderful gift," said Lincoln, 
as he listened to it, his eyes filled with tears, "to 
be able to stir men like that." The Skeleton in 
Armor, A Ballad of the French Fleet, Paul Revere* s 
Ride, The Wreck of the Hesperus, are ballads that 
stir men still. For all of his skill in story -telling 
in verse — witness the Tales of a Wayside Inn — 
Longfellow was not by nature a dramatist, and his 
trilogy now published under the title of Christus, 



156 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

made up of The Divine Tragedy y The Golden Legend, 
and New England Tragedies, added little to a repu- 
tation won in other fields. His sonnets, parti- 
cularly those upon Chancery Miltony The Divina 
Commedia, A Nameless Grave, Felton, Sumner, 
Nature, My Books, are among the imperishable 
treasures of the English language. In descriptive 
pieces like Keramos and The Hanging of the Crane, 
in such personal and occasional verses as The 
Herons ofElmwood, The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz, 
and the noble Morituri Salutamus written for his 
classmates in 1875, he exhibits his tenderness of 
affection and all the ripeness of his technical skill. 
But it was as a lyric poet, after all, that he won and 
held his immense audience throughout the English- 
speaking world. Two of the most popular of all 
his early pieces. The Psalm of Life and Excelsior, 
have paid the price of a too apt adjustment to the 
ethical mood of an earnest moment in our national 
life. We have passed beyond them. And many 
readers may have outgrown their youthful pleasure 
in Maidenhood, The Rainy Day, The Bridge, The 
Day is Done, verses whose simplicity lent them- 
selves temptingly to parody. Yet such poems as 
The Belfry of Bruges, Seaweed, The Fire of Drift- 
wood, The Arsenal at Springfield, My Lost Youth, 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 157 

The Children's Hour, and many another lyric, lose 
nothing with the lapse of time. There is fortu- 
nately infinite room for personal preference in this 
whole matter of poetry, but the confession of a lack 
of regard for Longfellow's verse must often be 
recognized as a confession of a lessening love for 
what is simple, graceful, and refined. The cur- 
rent of contemporary American taste, especially 
among consciously clever, half-trained persons, 
seems to be running against Longfellow. How 
soon the tide may turn, no one can say. Mean- 
while he has his tranquil place in the Poet's Corner 
of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey must be a 
pleasant spot to wait in, for the Portland boy. 
Oddly enough, some of the over-sophisticated 
and under-experienced people who affect to pat- 
ronize Longfellow assume toward John Greenleaf 
Whittier an air of deference. This attitude 
would amuse the Quaker poet. One can almost 
see his dark eyes twinkle and the grim lips 
tighten in that silent laughter in which the old 
man so much resembled Cooper's Leather-Stock- 
ing. Whittier knew that his friend Longfellow 
was a better artist than himself, and he also knew, 
by intimate experience as a maker of public opin- 
ion, how variable are its judgments. 



158 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Whittier represents a stock different from that 
of the Longfellows, but equally American, equally 
thoroughbred: the Essex County Quaker farmer 
of Massachusetts. The homestead in which he was 
born in 1807, at East Haverhill, had been built 
by his great-great-grandfather in 1688. Mount 
Vernon in Virginia and the Craigie House in 
Cambridge are newer than this by two generations. 
The house has been restored to the precise aspect 
it had in Whittier's boyhood: and the garden, 
lawn, and brook, even the door-stone and bridle- 
post and the barn across the road are witnesses 
to the fidelity of the descriptions in Snow-Bound. 
The neighborhood is still a lonely one. The 
youth grew up in seclusion, yet in contact with a 
few great ideas, chief among them Liberty. "My 
father," he said, "was an old-fashioned Demo- 
crat, and really believed in the Preamble of the 
Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration 
of Independence." The taciturn father trans- 
mitted to his sons a hatred of kingcraft and priest- 
craft, the inward moral freedom of the Quaker 
touched with humanitarian passion. The spirit of 
a boyhood in this homestead is veraciously told 
in The Barefoot Boy, School-Days, Snow-Bound, 
Ramoth Hill, and Telling the Bees. It was a chance 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 159 

copy of Burns that revealed to the farmer lad his 
own desire and capacity for verse- writing. When 
he was nineteen, his sister sent his Exile* s Depar- 
ture to William Lloyd Garrison, then twenty, and 
the editor of the Newhuryport Free Press. The 
neighbors liked it, and the tall frail author was 
rewarded with a term at the Haverhill Academy, 
where he paid his way, in old Essex County 
fashion, by making shoes. 

He had little more formal schooling than this, 
was too poor to enter college, but had what he 
modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and 
much facility in prose. He turned to journalism 
and politics, for which he possessed a notable 
instinct. For a while he thought he had "done 
with poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at 
twenty-six, came Garrison's stirring letter bidding 
him enlist in the cause of Anti-Slavery. He obeyed 
the call, not knowing that this new allegiance 
to the service of humanity was to transform him 
from a facile local verse-writer into a national 
poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's 
life and finding it. For the immediate sacrifice 
was very real to a youth trained in quietism and 
non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journal- 
ist, of the ostracism visited upon the active 



160 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight with 
absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical 
judgment of weapons and tactics. He forgot 
himself. He turned aside from those pleasant 
fields of New England legend and history to which 
he was destined to return after his warfare was 
accomplished. He had read the prose of Milton 
and of Burke. He perceived that negro emanci- 
pation in the United States was only a single 
and immediate phase of a universal movement of 
liberalism. The thought kindled his imagination. 
He wrote, at white heat, political and social verse 
that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in 
praise of fellow-workers, salutes to the dead, 
campaign songs, hymns, satires against the clergy 
and the capitalists, superb sectional poems like 
Massachusetts to Virginia, and, more nobly still, 
poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the 
sensation and image of country and the human 
race. " 

Whittier had now "found himself" as a poet. 
It is true that his style remained diffuse and 
his ear faulty, but his countrymen, then as now 
uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blem- 
ishes of his verse, and thought only of his vib- 
rant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 
Wood engraving from a photograph. 




JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
Photograph. 



^■a 



:-ii 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 
Photograph. 







OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES \ 
Wood engraving from a photogi ph. 



1^0 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight with 

absolute a>urage and with ' ';ydest practical 

>t of weapons an 3. He forgot 

i.in,-ii, He turned aside >; .'^ ^ rant 

fields, of Now Enf'land legend a ich 

he was :. return after vu-; wai' - is 

a^gf^Shed. He had r^^^f^^^^^^r' 
and of Burke. He perceived that negro emanci- 
pation in the United States was only a single 
and •" - j; - * f .,.,;..^-.„] jnovement of 

libei^- ^ miRcrination. 

He wrote, at white heat, p. I verse 

that glowed with humanitarian passion: lyrics in 
praise of fellow-workers, salut4^ 
campaign songs, hymns, satire? clergy 

and the capitalists, superb secuviun p. cms like 
Massachusetts to Virginia, and, more nobly still, 
poems embodying what Wordsworth called "the 
sensation and image of country and ' an 

.race." 

WhHh^-r hnd now "fr-': • , > ii " as a pocL 

^al(LiOH ijaayi^^ jia^,UO, , . ■;wcuia'^oyioi^BjiftQ]H?i(ik^ xaviai 

■•^"^ '^'''°'^'i^m'^i^^^mf^^°'^ ^ _...i^in<^BM^as now 

uncritical of artistic form, overlooked the blem- 
ishes of his verse, and thought only of his vib- 
rant emotion, his scorn of cowardice and evil, his 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 161 

prophetic exaltation. In 1847 came the first 
general collection of his poems, and here were to be 
found not merely controversial verses, but spirited 
Songs of Labor, pictures of the lovely Merrimac 
countryside, legends written in the mood of Haw- 
thorne or Longfellow, and bright bits of foreign 
lore and fancy. For though Whittier never 
went abroad, his quiet life at Amesbury gave 
him leisure for varied reading, and he followed 
contemporary European politics with the closest 
interest. He emerged more and more from the 
atmosphere of faction and section, and, though he 
retained to the last his Quaker creed, he held its 
simple tenets in such undogmatic and winning 
fashion that his hymns are sung today in all the 
churches. 

When The Atlantic Monthly was established in 
1857, \Miittier was fifty. He took his place among 
the contributors to the new magazine not as a 
controversialist but as a man of letters, with such 
poems as Tritemius, and Skipper Ireson's Ride. 
Characteristic productions of this period are 
My Psalm, Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Andrew 
Ryhman*s Prayer y The Eternal Goodness — poems 
grave, sweet, and tender. But it was not until the 
publication of Snow-Bound in 1866 that Whittier*s 



162 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

work touched its widest popularity. He had 
never married, and the deaths of his mother 
and sister Elizabeth set him brooding, in the deso- 
late Amesbury house, over memories of his birth- 
place, six miles away in East Haverhill. The 
homestead had gone out of the hands of the 
Whittiers, and the poet, nearing sixty, set himself 
to compose an idyll descriptive of the vanished 
past. No artist could have a theme more per- 
fectly adapted to his mood and to his powers. 
There are no novel ideas in Snow-Bound, nor is 
there any need of them, but the thousands of 
annual pilgrims to the old farmhouse can bear 
witness to the touching intimacy, the homely 
charm, the unerring rightness of feeling with 
which Whittier's genius recreated his own lost 
youth and painted for all time a true New England 
hearthside. 

Whittier was still to write nearly two hundred 
more poems, for he lived to be eighty -five, and he 
composed until the last. But his creative period 
was now over. He rejoiced in the friendly recogni- 
tion of his work that came to him from every sec- 
tion of a reunited country. His personal friends 
were loyal in their devotion. He followed the 
intricacies of American politics with the keen 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 163 

zest of a veteran in that game, for in his time 
he had made and mimade governors and senators. 
"The greatest politician I have ever met," said 
James G. Blaine, who had certainly met many. 
He had an income from his poems far in excess 
of his needs, but retained the absolute simplicity 
of his earlier habits. When his publishers first 
proposed the notable public dinner in honor of 
his seventieth birthday he demurred, explaining 
to a member of his family that he did not want the 
bother of "buying a new pair of pants" — a petty 
anecdote, but somehow refreshing. So the rustic, 
shrewd, gentle old man waited for the end. He 
had known what it means to toil, to fight, to 
renounce, to eat his bread in tears, and to see 
some of his dreams come true. We have had, 
and shall have, more accomplished craftsmen in 
verse, but we have never bred a more genuine 
man than Whittier, nor one who had more kinship 
with the saints. 

A few days before Whittier's death, he wrote 
an affectionate poem in celebration of the eighty- 
third birthday of his old friend of the Saturday 
Club, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was in 
1892. The little Doctor, rather lonely in his latest 
years, composed some tender obituary verses 



164 AMERICAN SPIRIT EST LITERATURE 

at Whittier's passing. He had already performed 

the same office for Lowell. He lingered himself 

until the autumn of 1894, in his eighty-sixth year — 

The Last Leaf, in truth, of New England's richest 

springtime. 

"No, my friends," he had said in The Autocrat 

of the Breakfast Table, "I go (always, other things 

being equal) for the man who inherits family 

traditions and the cumulative humanities of at 

least four or five generations. '* The Doctor came 

naturally by his preference for a "man of family," 

being one himself. He was a descendant of Anne 

Bradstreet, the poetess. "Dorothy Q.," whom he 

had made the most picturesque of the Quincys, 

was his great-grandmother. Wendell Phillips 

was his cousin. His father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, 

a Yale graduate, was the minister of the First 

Church in Cambridge, and it was in its "gambrel- 

roofed" parsonage that Oliver Wendell was born 

in 1809. 

Ejiow old Cambridge? Hope you do. — 

Bom there? Don't say so! I was, too, 

• •••••* 

Nicest place that was ever seen — 
Colleges red and Common green. 

So he wrote, in scores of passages of filial devotion, 
concerning the village of his boyhood and the 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 165 

city of Boston. His best-known prose sentence 
is: "Boston State House is the hub of the Solar 
System." It is easy to smile, as indeed he did 
himself, at such fond provinciality, but the fact 
remains that our literature as a whole sadly needs 
this richness of local atmosphere. A nation of 
restless immigrants, here today and "moved on'* 
tomorrow, has the fibres of its imagination 
uprooted, and its artists in their eager quest of 
"local color" purchase brilliancy at the cost of 
thinness of tone, poverty of association. Phila- 
delphia and Boston, almost alone among the 
larger American cities, yield the sense of intimacy, 
or what the Autocrat would call "the cumulative 
humanities. " 

Young Holmes became the pet and the glory of 
his class of 1829 at Harvard. It was only in 1838 
that their reunions began, but thereafter they 
held fifty-six meetings, of which Holmes attended 
fifty and wrote poems for forty-three. Many of 
"the Boys" whom he celebrated became famous 
in their own right, but they remain "the Boys" to 
all lovers of Holmes's verses. His own career as a 
poet had begun during his single year in the Law 
School. His later years brought him some addi- 
tional skill in pohshing his lines and a riper human 



166 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

wisdom, but his native verse-making talent is as 
completely revealed in Old Ironsides, published 
when he was twenty-one, and in The Last Leaf, 
composed a year or two later, as in anything 
he was to write during the next half -century. In 
many respects he was a curious survival of the 
cumulative humanities of the eighteenth century. 
He might have been, like good Dr. Arbuthnot, an 
ornament of the Augustan age. He shared with 
the English Augustans a liking for the rhymed 
couplet, an instinctive social sense, a feeling for 
the presence of an imaginary audience of congenial 
listeners. One still catches the "Hear! Hear!" 
between his clever lines. In many of the traits 
of his mind this "Yankee Frenchman" resembled 
such a typical eighteenth century figure as Vol- 
taire. Like Voltaire, he was tolerant — except 
toward Calvinism and Homeopathy. In some of 
the tricks of his prose style he is like a kindlier 
Sterne. His knack for vers de societe was caught 
from Horace, but he would not have been a 
child of his own age without the additional gift 
of rhetoric and eloquence which is to be seen in his 
patriotic poems and his hymns. For Holmes pos- 
sessed, in spite of all his limitations in poetic range, 
true devotion, patriotism, humor, and pathos. 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 167 

His poetry was in the best sense of the word 
" occasional," and his prose was only an incidental 
or accidental harvest of a long career in which his 
chief duty was that of a professor of anatomy in 
the Harvard Medical School. He had studied 
in Paris under sound teachers, and after some 
years of private practice won the appointment 
which he held, as active and emeritus professor, for 
forty-seven years. He was a faithful, clear, and 
amusing lecturer, and printed two or three nota- 
ble medical essays, but his chief Boston reputa- 
tion, in the eighteen-fifties, was that of a wit and 
diner-out and writer of verses for occasions. Then 
came his great hour of good luck in 1857, when 
Lowell, the editor of the newly-established Atlantic 
Monthly, persuaded him to write The Autocrat of 
the Breakfast Table. It was the public's luck 
also, for whoever had been so unfortunate as not 
to be born in Boston could now listen — as if across 
the table — to Boston's best talker. Few volumes 
of essays during the last sixty years have given 
more pleasure to a greater variety of readers than 
is yielded by The Autocrat. It gave the Doctor a 
reputation in England which he naturally prized, 
and which contributed to his triumphal English 
progress, many years later, recorded pleasantly in 



168 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Our Hundred Days. The Professor at the Breakfast 
Table and The Poet at the Breakfast Table are less 
successful variations of The Autocrat, Neither 
professors nor poets are at their best at this meal. 
Holmes wrote three novels — of which ^Z^ie Venner, 
a somewhat too medical story, is the best remem- 
bered — memoirs of his friends Emerson and 
Motley, and many miscellaneous essays. His life 
%was exceptionally happy, and his cheery good 
opinion of himself is still contagious. To pro- 
nounce the words Doctor Holmes in any company 
of intelligent Americans is the prologue to a smile 
of recognition, comprehension, sympathy. The 
word Goldsmith has now lost, alas, this provo- 
cative quality; the word Stevenson still possesses 
it. The little Doctor, who died in the same year 
as Stevenson, belonged like him to the genial race 
of friends of mankind, and a few of his poems, 
and some gay warm-hearted pages of his prose, 
will long preserve his memory. But the Boston 
which he loved has vanished as utterly as Sam 
Johnson's London. 

James Russell Lowell was ten years younger 
than Holmes, and though he died three years be- 
fore the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than 
those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 169 

present. Although by birth as much of a New 
England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years 
as much of a Boston and Cambridge idol, he never- 
theless touched our universal American life on 
many sides, represented us worthily in foreign 
diplomacy, argued the case of Democracy with 
convincing power, and embodied, as more perfect 
artists like Hawthorne and Longfellow could 
never have done, the subtleties and potencies 
of the national temperament. He deserves and 
reveals the closest scrutiny, but his personality is 
difficult to put on paper. Horace Scudder wrote 
his biography with careful competence, and 
Ferris Greenslet has made him the subject of a 
brilliant critical study. Yet readers differ widely 
in their assessment of the value of his prose and 
verse, and in their understanding of his personality. 
The external facts of his career are easy to trace 
and must be set down here with brevity. A 
minister's son, and descended from a very old 
and distinguished family, he was born at Elmwood 
in Cambridge in 1819. After a somewhat turbu- 
lent course, he was graduated from Harvard in 
1838, the year of Emerson's Divinity School 
Address. He studied law, turned Abolitionist, 
wrote poetry, married the beautiful and transcen- 



170 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

dental Maria White, and did magazine work in 
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was 
thought by his friends in the eighteen-fifties to be 
* ' the most Shakespearian ' ' man in America. When 
he was ten years out of college, in 1848, he pub- 
lished The Biglow Papers (First Series), A Fable 
for Critics, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. After a 
long visit to Europe and the death of his wife, he 
gave some brilliant Lowell Institute lectures in 
Boston, and was appointed Longfellow's suc- 
cessor at Harvard. He went to Europe again to 
prepare himself, and after entering upon his work 
as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served 
for four years as the first editor of The Atlantic, 
and helped his friend Charles Eliot Norton edit 
The North American Review. The Civil War 
inspired a second series of Biglow Papers and the 
magnificent Commemoration Ode of 1865. Then 
came volume after volume of literary essays, 
such as Among My Books and My Study Windows, 
and an occasional book of verse. Again he made 
a long sojourn in Europe, resigned his Harvard 
professorship, and in 1877 was appointed Minister 
to Spain. After three years he was transferred 
to the most important post in our diplomatic 
service, London. He performed his duties with 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 171 

extraordinary skill and success until 1885, when 
he was relieved. His last years were spent in 
Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was 
born, and he was still writing, in almost as rich 
a vein as ever, when the end came in 1891. 

Here was certainly a full and varied life, 
responsive to many personal moods and many 
tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellect- 
ual stimulus from enormously wide reading in 
classical and modern literatures. Puritanically 
earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have 
inherited a strain of levity which he could not 
always control, and, through his mother's family, 
a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling second 
sight. His physical and mental powers were not 
always in the happiest mutual adjustment: he 
became easily the prey of moods and fancies, and 
knew the alternations from wild gaiety of spirits 
to black despair. The firm moral consistency of 
Puritanism was always his, yet his playful remark 
about belonging in a hospital for incurable chil- 
dren had a measure of truth in it also. 

Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature 
never quite integrated into wholeness of struc- 
ture, into harmony with itself. His writing, at its 
best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm. 



172 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

but it is difficult for him to master a certain 
waywardness and to sustain any note steadily. 
This temperamental flaw does not affect the 
winsomeness of his letters, unless to add to it. It 
is lost to view, often, in the sincerity and pathos of 
his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer efforts 
in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction 
which many grateful and loyal readers neverthe- 
less feel in his criticism. Lowell was more richly 
endowed by nature and by breadth of reading 
than Matthew Arnold, for instance, but in the 
actual performance of the critical function he was 
surpassed in method by Arnold and perhaps in 
inerrant perception, in a limited field, by Poe. 

It was as a poet, however, that he first won his 
place in our literature, and it is by means of 
certain passages in the Biglow Papers and the 
Commemoration Ode that he has most moved 
his countrymen. The effectiveness of The Present 
Crisis and Sir Launfal, and of the Memorial Odes, 
particularly the Ode to Agassiz, is likewise due 
to the passion, sweetness, and splendor of certain 
strophes, rather than to the perfection of these 
poems as artistic wholes. Lowell's personal lyrics 
of sorrow, such as The Changeling, The First Snow- 
Fall, After the Burial, have touched many hearts. 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 173 

His later lyrics are more subtle, weighted with 
thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He 
was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men 
of his time and group, produced too much. Yet 
his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and 
is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot 
wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political 
satire, such as the two series of Biglow Papers, he 
had a theme and a method precisely suited to his 
temperament. No American has approached 
Lowell's success in this difficult genre: the swift 
transitions from rural Yankee humor to splendid 
scorn of evil and to noblest idealism reveal the full 
powers of one of our most gifted men. The preacher 
lurked in this Puritan from first to last, and the 
war against Mexico and the Civil War stirred him 
to the depths. 

His prose, likewise, is a school of loyalty. There 
was much of Europe in his learning, as his memor- 
able Dante essay shows, and the traditions of 
great English literature were the daily compan- 
ions of his mind. He was bookish, as a bookman 
should be, and sometimes the very richness and 
whimsicality of his bookish fancies marred the 
simplicity and good taste of his pages. But the 
fundamental texture of his thought and feeling 



174 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

was American, and his most characteristic style 
has the raciness of our soil. Nature lovers like to 
p>oint out the freshness and delicacy of his reaction 
to the New England scene. Thoreau himself, 
whom Lowell did not like, was not more veracious 
an observer than the author of Sunthin^ in the 
Pastoral Line, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 
and My Garden Acquaintance. Yet he watched 
men as keenly as he did "laylocks" and bobolinks, 
and no shrewder American essay has been written 
than his On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 
Wit and humor and wisdom made him one of the 
best talkers of his generation. These qualities 
pervade his essays and his letters, and the latter 
in particular reveal those ardors and fidelities of 
friendship which men like Emerson and Thoreau 
longed after without ever quite experiencing. 
Lowell's cosmopolitan reputation, which was 
greatly enhanced in the last decade of his life, 
seemed to his old associates of the Saturday 
Club only a fit recognition of the learning, wit, 
and fine imagination which had been familiar 
to them from the first. To hold the old friends 
throughout his lifetime, and to win fresh ones 
of a new generation through his books, is perhaps 
the greatest of Lowell's personal felicities. 



ROI^L\NCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 175 

T\Tiile there are no other names in the Hterature 
of New England quite comparable with those that 
have just been discussed, it should be remembered 
that the immediate effectiveness and popularity of 
these representative poets and prose writers were 
dependent upon the existence of an intelligent 
and responsive reading public. The lectures of 
Emerson, the speeches of Webster, the stories 
of Hawthorne, the political verse of Whittier 
and Lowell, presupposed a keen, reflecting audi- 
ence, mentally and morally exigent. The spread 
of the Lyceum system along the line of west- 
ward emigration from New England as far as 
the Mississippi is one tangible evidence of the 
high level of popular intelligence. That there was 
much of the superficial and the spread-eagle in the 
American life of the eighteen-forties is apparent 
enough without the amusing comments of such 
English travellers as Dickens, Miss Martineau, 
and Captain Basil Hall. But there was also 
genuine intellectual curiosity and a general reading 
habit which are evidenced not only by a steady 
growth of newspapers and magazines but also by 
the demand for substantial books. Biography and 
history began to be widely read, and it was natural 
that the most notable productiveness in historical 



176 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

writing should manifest itself in that section of the 
country where there were libraries, wealth, leisure 
for the pursuits of scholarship, a sense of intimate 
concern with the great issues of the past, and a 
diffusion of intellectual tastes throughout the 
community. It was no accident that Sparks and 
Ticknor, Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Park- 
man, were Massachusetts men. 

Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth 
nor leisure. He was a furious, imwearied toiler 
in the field of our national history. Born in 1789, 
by profession a Unitarian minister, he began col- 
lecting the papers of George Washington by 1825. 
I John Marshall, the great jurist, had published his 
five-volume life of his fellow Virginian a score of 
years earlier. But Sparks proceeded to write 
another biography of Washington and to edit his 
writings. He also edited a Library of American 
Biography, wrote lives of Franklin and Gouver- 
neur Morris, was professor of history and Presi- 
dent of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven. 
As editor of the writings of Franklin and Washing- 
ton, he took what we now consider unpardonable 
liberties in altering the text, and this error of judg- 
ment has somewhat clouded his just reputation 
as a pioneer in historical research. 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 177 

George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and 
died, a horseback-riding sage, at ninety-one, in- 
herited from his clergyman father a taste for 
history. He studied in Germany after leaving Har- 
vard, turned schoolmaster. Democratic politician 
and oflfice-holder, served as Secretary of the Navy, 
Minister to England and then to the German Em- 
pire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, 
though the real passion of his life was his History 
of the United States, which he succeeded in bringing 
down to the adoption of the Constitution. The 
first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today 
like a stump speech by a sturdy Democratic orator 
of the Jacksonian period. But there was solid 
stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft proceeded, 
decade after decade, he discarded some of his 
rhetoric and philosophy of democracy and utilized 
increasingly the vast stores of documents which his 
energy and his high political positions had made 
it possible for him to obtain. Late in life he con- 
densed his ten great volumes to six. Posterity 
will doubtless condense these in turn, as posterity 
has a way of doing, but Bancroft the historian 
realized his own youthful ambition with a com- 
pleteness rare in the history of human effort and 
performed a monumental service to his country. 



178 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

He was less of an artist, however, than Prescott, 
the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of 
the well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group 
of Boston historians. All of these men, together 
with their friend George Ticknor, who wrote the 
History of Spanish Literature and whose own Life 
and Letters pictures a whole generation, had the 
professional advantages of inherited wealth, and 
the opportunity to make deliberate choice of a 
historical field which oflFered freshness and pictur- 
esqueness of theme. All were tireless workers in 
spite of every physical handicap; all enjoyed social 
security and the rich reward of full recognition by 
their contemporaries. They had their world as 
in their time, as Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath 
say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live 
in. 

Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker 
Hill, and son of the rich Judge Prescott of Salem, 
William Hickling Prescott was born in 1796, and 
was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An acci- 
dent in college destroyed the sight of one eye, and 
left him but a precarious use of the other. Never- 
theless he resolved to emulate Gibbon, whose Auto- 
biography had impressed him, and to make himself 
"an historian in the best sense of the term." He 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 179 

studied arduously in Europe, with the help of 
secretaries, and by 1826, after a long hesitation, 
decided upon a History of the Reign of Ferdinand 
and Isabella. In ten years the three volumes were 
finished. "Pursuing the work in this quiet, lei- 
surely way, without over-exertion or fatigue," 
wrote Prescott, "or any sense of obligation to 
complete it in a given time, I have found it a 
continual source of pleasure." It was published 
at his own expense on Christmas Day, 1837, and 
met with instantaneous success. "My market 
and my reputation rest principally with England," 
he wrote in 1838 — a curious footnote, by the 
way, to Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa Address of 
the year before. But America joined with Eng- 
land, in praising the new book. Then Prescott 
turned to the Conquest of Mexico, the Conquest of 
Peru, and finally to his unfinished History of the 
Reign of Philip II. He had, as Dean Milman 
wrote him, "the judgment to choose noble sub- 
jects. " He wrote with serenity and dignity, with 
fine balance and proportion. Some of the Spanish 
documents upon which he relied have been proved 
less trustworthy than he thought, but this unsus- 
pected defect in his materials scarcely impaired 
the skill with which this unhasting, unresting 



180 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

painter filled his great canvases. They need 
retouching, perhaps, but the younger historians 
are incompetent for the task. Prescott died 
in 1859, in the same year as Irving, and he 
already seems quite as remote from the present 
hour. 

His young friend Motley, of Dutch Republic 
fame, was another Boston Brahmin, born in the 
year of Prescott's graduation from college. He 
attended George Bancroft's school, went to Har- 
vard in due course, where he knew Holmes, Sum- 
ner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Gottingen became 
a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named 
Bismarck. Young Motley wrote a couple of un- 
successful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, 
and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by 
Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history, went 
to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, 
after five years, scored an immense triumph with 
his Rise of the Dutch Republic. He was a bril- 
liant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists, 
and wrote all the better for this bias. He was 
an admirable sketcher of historical portraits, 
and had Macaulay's skill in composing special 
chapters devoted to the tendencies and qual- 
ities of an epoch or to the characteristics of 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 181 

a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced 
the four volumes of the History of the United Nether- 
lands. During the Civil War he served usefully as 
American minister to Vienna, and in 1869 was 
appointed minister to London. Both of these 
appointments ended unhappily for him. Dr. 
Holmes, his loyal admirer and biographer, does 
not conceal the fact that a steadier, less excitable 
type of pubKc servant might have handled both 
the Vienna situation and the London situation 
without incurring a recall. Motley continued to 
live in England, where his daughters had married, 
and where, in spite of his ardent Americanism, he 
felt socially at home. His last book was The Life 
and Death of John of Barneveld. His Letters, 
edited after his death in 1877 by George William 
Curtis, give a fascinating picture of English life 
among the cultivated and leisurely classes. The 
Boston merchant's son was a high-hearted gentle- 
man, and his cosmopolitan experiences used to 
make his stay-at-home friend, Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, feel rather dull and provincial in com- 
parison. Both were Sons of Liberty, but Motley 
had had the luck to find in "brave little Holland" 
a subject which captivated the interest of Europe 
and gave the historian international fame. He 



182 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

had more eloquence than the Doctor, and a far 
more varied range of prose, but there may be here 
and there a Yankee guesser about the taste of 
future generations who will bet on The Autocrat, 
after all. 

The character and career of Francis Parkman 
afford curious material to the student of New 
England's golden age. In the seventy years of his 
heroic life, from 1823 to 1893, all the character- 
istic forces of the age reached their culmination 
and decline, and his own personality indicates 
some of the violent reactions produced by the 
over-strain of Transcendentalism. For here was 
a descendant of John Cotton, and a clergyman's 
son, who detested Puritanism and the clergy; who, 
coming to manhood in the eighteen-forties, hated 
the very words Transcendentalism, Philosophy, 
Religion, Reform; an inheritor of property, trained 
at Harvard, and an Overseer and Fellow of his 
University, who disliked the ideals of culture 
and refinement; a member of the Saturday Club 
who was bored with literary talk and literary 
people; a staunch American who despised democ- 
racy as thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and 
thought suffrage a failure; a nineteenth century 
historian who cared nothing for philosophy, science, 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 183 

or the larger lessons of history itself; a fascinating 
realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and 
Cooper for their tales of action, and despised 
Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate sentiment- 
alists who were preoccupied with themselves. In 
Parkman "the wheel has come full circle," and a 
movement that began with expansion of self ended 
in hard Spartan repression, even in inhibition of 
emotion. 

Becoming "enamoured of the woods'* at six- 
teen, Parkman chose his life work at eighteen, 
and he was a man who could say proudly: "I 
have not yet abandoned any plan which I ever 
formed." "Before the end of the sophomore 
year, " he wrote in his autobiography, "my various 
schemes had crystallized into a plan of writing 
the story of what was then known as the Old 
French War, that is, the war that ended in the con- 
quest of Canada, for here, as it seemed to me, 
the forest drama was more stirring and the forest 
stage more thronged with appropriate actors than 
in any other passage of our history. It was not 
till some years later that I enlarged the plan 
to include the whole course of the American 
conflict between France and England, or, in other 
words, the history of the American forest: for this 



184 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

was the light in which I regarded it. My theme 
fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness 
images day and night." To understand "the 
history of the American forest" young Parkman 
devoted his college vacations to long trips in the 
wilderness, and in 1846, two years after graduation, 
he made the epoch-making journey described in 
his first book, The Oregon Trail. 

The Conspiracy of Pontiac, a highly-colored 
narrative in two volumes appearing in 1851, 
marks the first stage of his historical writing. 
Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and 
for fourteen years Parkman fought for life and 
sanity, and produced practically nothing. He 
had had to struggle from his college days with an 
obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by the 
hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by ill- 
considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by 
over-exertion. His disease took many forms — 
insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, incapacity 
for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham 
says that "he never saw a perfectly well day dur- 
ing his entire literary career." Even when aided 
by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was 
often the limit of his production. His own Stoic 
words about the limitations of his eyesight are 



GEORGE BANCROFT 
Engraving in Bancroft's History. 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 
Photograph. 



WILLIAM II. PRESCOTT 
Engraving by Welch. 



M .PmiT JBSf RE 

was the Hgflit in which T ■ theme 

fascinated iiie, and I was haut aess 

imjiges day and night." 

' of the Am«i9ssi®Aka a'aao;^© 
, . . . ca his collj^j^v^s^fl^ifligg rlf ^i9i^,^fla 
wilderness, and in 1846, two years ai 1 cr gr<! 
he made the epoch-making journey described i a 
his first book, The Oregon Trail. 

The ' Pontiac, a highly-colored 

nar - "ig in 1851, 

Then came th 

for foartc Parkman fought fou 

sanity, cv^d practically noth^ 

had had to stiuggic Irr- > : « ; • 
obscure disorder of th<3'M^lJ?,'^\ggrft\aLi::u oy uie 
hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by ill- 
considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by 
over-exertion. His disease took 
insomnia, arthritis, weakness 
l;;r sustained, t 

''"at "he I'li aay . 

•'?**"'^ .. when aiced 

iues a day was 
of' <»f his ?ii. His own Stoic 

words -.1'^' Lo!:;-;. :.;.•:■■ ot ,'is eyesight are 

.rfobW ^d §nivi5i§nH 



ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY 185 

characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and 
then resting for an equal time, this alternate 
process may gradually be continued for about 
half an hour. Then, after a suflScient interval, 
it may be repeated, often three or four times in 
the course of the day. By this means nearly the 
whole of the volume now offered has been com- 
posed." There is no more piteous or inspiring 
story of a fight against odds in the history of 
literature. 

For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way 
a little, and book after book somehow got itself 
written. There they stand upon the shelves, a 
dozen of them — The Pioneers of France, The 
Jesuits in North America, La Salle, The Old 
Regime, Frontenac, Montcalm and Wolfe, A Half- 
Century of Conflict — the boy's dream realized, the 
man's long warfare accomplished. The history of 
the forest, as Parkman saw it, was a pageant with 
the dark wilderness for a background, and, for the 
actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits, in- 
trepid explorers, soldiers of France — all struggling 
for a vast prize, all changing, passing, with a 
pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It 
was a superb theme, better after all for an Ameri- 
can than the themes chosen by Prescott and Tick- 



186 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

nor and Motley, and precisely adapted to the 
pictorial and narrative powers of the soldier- 
minded, soldier-hearted author. 

The quality which Parkman admired most in 
men — though he never seems to have loved men 
deeply, even his own heroes — was strength of will. 
That was the secret of his own power, and the 
sign, it must be added, of the limitations of this 
group of historians who came at the close of the 
golden age. Whatever a New England will can 
accomplish was wrought manfully by such admir- 
able men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained in- 
telligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful 
cultivation of appropriate story-telling and picture- 
painting style, all these were theirs. But the 
"wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson 
as he crossed the bare Common at sunset, the 
"supernal beauty" of which Poe dreamed in 
the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound 
and turtle-dove which Thoreau lost long ago and 
could not find in his hut at Walden, these were 
something which our later Greeks of the New 
England Athens esteemed as foolishness. 



CHAPTER Vni 



POE AND WHITMAN 



Enter now two egotists, who have little in com- 
mon save their egotism, two outsiders who upset 
most of the conventional American rules for win- 
ning the literary race, two men of genius, in 
short, about whom we are still quarreling, and 
whose distinctive quality is more accurately per- 
ceived in Europe than it has ever been in the 
United States. 

Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by 
temperament. Both shared in the tradition and 
influence of European Romanticism. But they 
were also late comers, and they were caught in the 
more morbid and extravagant phases of the great 
European movement while its current was begin- 
ning to ebb. Their acquaintance with its litera- 
ture was mainly at second-hand and through the 
medium of British and American periodicals. 
Poe, who was older than Whitman by ten years, 

187 



188 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He was 
untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though 
his verse was colored by the influence of Byron, 
Moore, and Shelley. His prose models were De 
Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer. Yet he owed 
more to Coleridge than to any of the Romantics, 
He was himself a sort of Coleridge without the 
piety, with the same keen penetrating critical 
intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed 
dreams, and, alas, with something of the same 
reputation as a dead-beat. 

A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be 
born in Boston, but he hated "Frog-Pondium" — 
his favorite name for the city of his nativity — as 
much as Whistler hated his native town of Lowell. 
His father died early of tuberculosis, and his 
mother, after a pitiful struggle with disease and pov- 
erty, soon followed her husband to the grave. The 
boy, by physical inheritance a neurasthenic, 
though with marked bodily activity in youth, was 
adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Rich- 
mond, Virginia. Poe liked to think of himself as 
a Southerner. He was sent to school in England, 
and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly 
a year the newly founded University of Virginia. 
He was a dark, short, bow-legged boy, with the 



POE AND WHITMAN 189 

face of his own Roderick Usher. He made a good 
record in French and Latin, read, wrote and 
recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Moun- 
tains, and did not notably exceed his companions 
in drinking and gambhng. But his Scotch foster- 
father disapproved of his conduct and withdrew 
him from the University. A period of wandering 
followed. He enlisted in the army and was sta- 
tioned in Boston in 1827, when his first volume, 
Tamerlane, was published. In 1829 he was in 
Fortress Monroe, and published Al Aaraf at Balti- 
more. He entered West Point in 1830, and was 
surely, except Wliistler, the strangest of all possible 
cadets. When he was dismissed in 1831, he had 
written the marvellous lines To Helen, Israfel, 
and The City in the Sea. That is enough to have 
in one's knapsack at the age of twenty-two. 

In the eighteen years from 1831 to 1849, when 
Poe's unhappy life came to an end in a Baltimore 
hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that of a 
journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived 
in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New 
York. Authors who now exploit their fat bar- 
gains with their publishers may have forgotten 
that letter which Poe wrote back to Philadelphia 
the morning after he arrived with his child-wife in 



190 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

New York: "We are both in excellent spirits. . . . 
We have now got four dollars and a half left. 
To-morrow I am going to try and borrow three 
dollars, so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. '* 
When the child-wife died in the shabby cottage 
at Fordham, her wasted body was covered with the 
old army overcoat which Poe had brought from 
West Point. If Poe met some of the tests of 
practical life inadequately, it must be remembered 
that his health failed at twenty-five, that he was 
pitiably poor, and that the slightest indulgence 
in drink set his over-wrought nerves jangling. 
Ferguson, the former office-boy of the Literary 
Messenger, judged this man of letters with an 
office-boy's firm and experienced eye: *'Mr. Poe 
was a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was 
ever kind and courtly, and at such times every- 
one liked him. But when he was drinking he was 
about one of the most disagreeable men I have 
ever met." "I am sorry for him," wrote C. F. 
Briggs to Lowell. "He has some good points, but 
taken altogether, he is badly made up." "Badly 
made up," no doubt, both in body and mind, 
but all respectable and prosperous Pharisees 
should be reminded that Poe did not make him- 
self; or rather, that he could not make himself 



^t*. 






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1^1 . ■ - -llt'^Jtf 



m' 






If< 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



Daguerreotype by Pratt, Richmond, Va., said to be Poe's last por- 
trait. In the collection of The Plaj^ers, New York. 



New Yc 3 both ; pin'ts. . 

We ha got fop -t, 

£ am going three 

-^ that I may have 
' i.-a die child-wife died ii. 
it Fordham, her wasted body w 
old army overcoat which Poe had bvoug' 

West Point. Mo?%.iSg^M88^ <>^ *' 

rraptkial life 4ii;uieQuately,,i.Lmust be : ed 

f]i.j( }d^t\\m1fih^4^id^'^%tohmiiMi^6^y&l tikii- ixc was 

' ■■"- poor, -. ■ ' ■■ '■ •■'"^•— "— 



J.: t 

office-boy *s timi and expe 

was a fine gentleman when iic wa^ sober, lie Vv...s 
ever kind and courtly, and at such times every- 
one liked him. But when l^^ wns r]rln\*?u^ hv- was 
a bout one of the most d 



f'\r 


i am S' 




Bnggs 




ood por 




ither, he U 


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.: Pharisees 

not make him- 

t make himself 




"^tji^TBeri-Lcinio ■' 



POE AND WHITMAN 191 

over. Very few men can. Given Poe's tempera- 
ment, and the problem is insoluble. He wrote 
to Lowell in 1844: "I have been too deeply con- 
scious of the mutability and evanescence of tem- 
poral things to give any continuous effort to 
anything — to be consistent in anything. My life 
has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing 
for solitude — a scorn of all things present in an 
earnest desire for the future. " It is the pathetic 
confession of a dreamer. Yet this dreamer was 
also a keen analyzer, a tireless creator of beautiful 
things. In them he sought and found a refuge 
from actuality. The marvel of his career is, as I 
have said elsewhere, that this solitary, embittered 
craftsman, out of such hopeless material as nega- 
tions and abstractions, shadows and superstitions, 
out of disordered fancies and dreams of physical 
horror and strange crime, should have wrought 
structures of imperishable beauty. 

Let us notice the critical instinct which he 
brought to the task of creation. His theory of 
verse is simple, in fact too simple to account for 
all of the facts. The aim of poetry, according to 
Poe, is not truth but pleasure — the rhythmical 
creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefi- 
nite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. 



192 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a 
means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. 
Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true 
type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Read- 
ers who respond more readily to auditory than 
to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's 
chosen audience. For them he executes, like 
Paganini, marvels upon his single string. He has 
easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, 
the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the 
phrase which echoes, with some variation, a phrase 
or line already used. In such poems as To 
Helen, Israfel, The Haunted Palace, Annabel Lee, 
the theme, the tone, the melody all weave their 
magic spell; it is like listening to a lute-player in a 
dream. 

That the device often turns into a trick is 
equally true. In The Bells and The Raven we 
detect the prestidigitator. It is jugglery, though 
such juggling as only a master-musician can per- 
form. In Ulalume and other show-pieces the 
wires get crossed and the charm snaps, scattering 
tinsel fragments of nonsense verse. Such are the 
dangers of the technical temperament unenriched 
by wide and deep contact with human feeling. 

Poe*s theory of the art of the short story is 



POE AND WHITMAN 193 

now familiar enough. The power of a tale, he 
thought, turned chiefly if not solely upon its unity, 
its harmony of effect. This is illustrated in all 
of his finest stories. In The Fall of the House oj 
Usher the theme is Fear; the opening sentence 
strikes the key and the closing sentence contains 
the climax. In the whole composition every sen- 
tence is modulated to the one end in view. The 
autumn landscape tones with the melancholy 
house; the somber chamber frames the cadaverous 
face of Roderick Usher; the face is an index of the 
tumultuous agitation of a mind wrestling with 
the grim phantom Fear and awaiting the cumu- 
lative horror of the final moment. In Ligeitty 
which Poe sometimes thought the best of all his 
tales, the theme is the ceaseless life of the will, the 
potency of the spirit of the beloved and departed 
woman. The unity of effect is absolute, the 
workmanship consummate. So with the theme 
of revenge in The Cash of Amontillado^ the theme 
of mysterious intrigue in The Assignation. In 
Poe's detective stories, or tales of ratiocination as 
he preferred to call them, he takes to pieces for 
our amusement a puzzle which he has cunningly 
put together. The Gold Bug is the best known of 
these. The Purloined Letter the most perfect. The 



13 



194 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Murders in the Rue Morgue the most sensa- 
tional. Then there are the tales upon scientific 
subjects or displaying the pretence of scientific 
knowledge, where the narrator loves to pose as 
a man without imagination and with "habits of 
rigid thought. " And there are tales of conscience, 
of which The Black Cat is the most fearful and 
William Wilson the most subtle; and there are 
landscape sketches and fantasies and extrava- 
ganzas, most of these poor stuff. 

It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to 
dwell upon Poe's limitations. His scornful glance 
caught certain aspects of the human drama 
with camera-like precision. Other aspects of 
life, and nobler, he never seemed to perceive. 
The human comedy sometimes moved him to 
laughter, but his humor is impish and his wit 
malign. His imagination fled from the daylight; 
he dwelt in the twilight among the tombs. He 
closed his eyes to dream, and could not see the 
green sunlit earth, seed-time and harvest, man 
going forth to his toil and returning to his hearth- 
stone, the America that laughs as it labors. He 
wore upon his finger the magic ring and the genii 
did his bidding. But we could wish that the 
palaces they reared for him were not in such a 



I 



POE AND WHITMAN 195 

somber land, with such infernal lights gleaming 
in their windows, and crowded with such horror- 
haunted forms. We could wish that his imagin- 
ation dealt less often with those primitive terrors 
that belong to the childhood of our race. Yet 
when his spell is upon us we lapse back by a sort 
of atavism into primal savagery and shudder with 
a recrudescence of long forgotten fears. No doubt 
Poe was ignorant of life, in the highest sense. He 
was caged in by his ignorance. Yet he had beau- 
tiful dusky wings that bruised themselves against 
his prison. 

Poe was a tireless critic of his own work, and 
both his standards of workmanship and his 
critical precepts have been of great service to 
his careless countrymen. He turned out between 
four and five short stories a year, was poorly paid 
for them, and indeed found difficulty in selling 
them at all. Yet he was constantly correcting 
them for the better. His best poems were like- 
wise his latest. He was tantalized with the desire 
for artistic perfection. He became the path- 
breaker for a long file of men in France, Italy, 
England, and America. He found the way and 
they brought back the glory and the cash. 

I have sometimes imagined Poe, with four other 



196 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

men and one woman, seated at a dinner-table laid 
for six, and talking of their art and of themselves. 
What would the others think of Poe? I fancy 
that Thackeray would chat with him courteously, 
but would not greatly care for him. George 
Eliot, woman-like, would pity him. Hawthorne 
would watch him with those inscrutable eyes and 
understand him better than the rest. But Steven- 
son would be immensely interested; he would begin 
an essay on Poe before he went to sleep. And 
Mr. Kipling would look sharply at him: he has 
seen that man before, in The Gate of a Hundred 
Sorrows. All of them would find in him some- 
thing to praise, a great deal to marvel at, and 
perhaps not much to love. And the sensitive, 
shabby, lonely Poe — what would he think of them? 
He might not care much for the other guests, but I 
think he would say to himself with a thrill of pride: 
"I belong at this table." And he does. 

Walt Whitman, whom his friend O'Connor 
dubbed the "good gray poet," offers a bizarre 
contrast to Edgar Allan Poe. There was nothing 
distinctively American about Poe except his 
ingenuity; he had no interest in American history 
or in American ideas; he was a timeless, placeless 
embodiment of technical artistry. But Whitman 



POE AND WHITMAN 197 

had a passion for his native soil; he was hypnotized 
by the word America; he spent much of his mature 
Hfe in brooding over the question, "What, after 
all, is an American, and what should an American 
poet be in our age of science and democracy?'* 
It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of the 
average citizen of "these states." His person- 
ality is imique. In many respects he still baffles 
our curiosity. He repels many of his countrymen 
without arousing the pity which adds to their 
romantic interest in Poe. W^hatever our literary 
students may feel, and whatever foreign critics 
may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the 
vast majority of Ajnerican men and women "good 
old Walt" is still an outsider. 

Let us try to see first the type of mind with 
which we are dealing. It is fundamentally re- 
ligious, perceiving the imity and kinship and glory 
of all created things. It is this passion of worship 
which inspired St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle to the 
Sun. It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia opera Domini: 
All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the 
Lord!" That is the real motto for Whitman's 
Leaves of Grass. Like St. Francis, and like his 
own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
Whitman is a mystic. He cannot argue the 



198 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

ultimate questions; he asserts them. Instead of 
marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, 
he chants "I know I am deathless." Like Emer- 
son again, Whitman shares that peculiarly Ameri- 
can type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, 
but he came at the end of this movement instead of 
at the beginning of it. In his Romanticism, like- 
wise, he is an end of an era figure. His affiliations 
with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of 
Scott's poems which he owned at the age of six- 
teen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury 
for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite as 
uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, 
Whitman is an individualist. He represents the 
assertive, Jacksonian period of our national exist- 
ence. In a thousand similes he makes a declara- 
tion of independence for the separate person, the 
"single man" of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa 
address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors 
and out." Sometimes this is mere swagger. 
Sometimes it is superb. 

So much for the type. Let us turn next to the 
story of Whitman's life. It must here be told in 
the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose and 
poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He 
was born on Long Island, of New England and 



POE AND WHITMAN 199 

Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, 
and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as 
was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a 
carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There 
were many children. Whien little "Walt" — as he 
was called, to distinguish him from his father, 
Walter — was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. 
The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he 
was twenty had tried type-setting, teaching, and 
editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He 
was a big, dark-haired fellow, sensitive, emotional, 
extraordinarily impressible. 

The next sixteen years were full of happy 
vagrancy. At twenty-two he was editing a paper 
in New York, and furnishing short stories to the 
Democratic Review, a literary journal which num- 
bered Bryant, Longfellow, WTiittier, Poe, Haw- 
thorne, and Thoreau among its contributors. He 
wrote a novel on temperance, "mostly in the 
reading-room of Tammany Hall," and tried here 
and there an experiment in free verse. He was in 
love with the pavements of New York and the 
Brooklyn ferry-boats, in love with Italian opera 
and with long tramps over Long Island. He left 
his position on The Brooklyn Eagle and wandered 
south to New Orleans. By and by he drifted back 



200 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

to New York, tried lecturing, worked at the car- 
penter's trade with his father, and brooded over 
a book — "a book of new things." 

This was the famous Leaves of Grass. He set 
the type himself, in a Brooklyn printing-office, 
and printed about eight hundred copies. The 
book had a portrait of the author — a meditative, 
gray-bearded poet in workman's clothes — and a 
confused preface on America as a field for the 
true poet. Then followed the new gospel, "I 
celebrate myself," chanted in long lines of free 
verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary 
readers. For the most part it was passionate 
speech rather than song, a rhapsodical declamation 
in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the 
book or pretended to understand what it was 
all about. Some were startled by the frank 
sexuality of certain poems. But Emerson wrote 
to Whitman from Concord: "I find it the most 
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that 
America has yet contributed. " 

Until the Civil War was half over. Whitman 
remained in Brooklyn, patiently composing new 
poems for successive printings of his book. Then 
he went to the front to care for a wounded brother, 
and finally settled down in a Washington garret 



POE AND WHITMAN 201 

to spend his strength as an army hospital nurse. 
He wrote Drum Taps and other magnificent 
poems about the War, culminating in his threnody 
on Lincoln's death, When Lilacs last in the Door- 
yard Bloomed. Swinburne called this "the most 
sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of 
the world. " After the war had ended, Whitman 
stayed on in Washington as a government clerk, 
and saw much of John Burroughs and W. D. 
O'Connor. John Hay was a staimch friend. 
Some of the best known poets and critics of 
England and the Continent now began to recog- 
nize his genius. But his health had been per- 
manently shattered by his heroic service as a nurse, 
and in 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke which 
forced him to resign his position in Washington 
and remove to his brother's home in Camden, New 
Jersey. 

He was only fifty-four, but his best work was 
already done, and his remaining years, until his 
death in 1892, were those of patient and serene 
invalidism. He wrote some fascinating prose in 
this final period, and his cluttered chamber in 
Camden became the shrine of many a literary pil- 
grim, among them some of the foremost men of 
letters of this country and of Europe. He was 



202 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

cared for by loyal friends. Occasionally lie 
appeared in public, a magnificent gray figure of 
a man. And then, at seventy-tbree, the "Dark 
mother always gliding near" enfolded him. 

There are puzzling things in the physical and 
moral constitution of Walt Whitman, and the 
obstinate questions involved in his theory of 
poetry and in his actual poetical performance are 
still far from solution. But a few points concern- 
ing him are by this time fairly clear. They must 
be swiftly summarized. 

The first obstacle to the popular acceptance of 
Walt Whitman is the formlessness or alleged 
formlessness of Leaves of Grass. This is a highly 
technical question, involving a more accurate 
notation than has thus far been made of the 
patterns and tunes of free verse and of emotional 
prose. Whitman's "new and national declama- 
tory expression," as he termed it, cannot receive 
a final technical valuation until we have made 
more scientific progress in the analysis of rhythms. 
As regards the contents of his verse, it is plain that 
he included much material unfused and untrans- 
formed by emotion. These elements foreign to 
the nature of poetry clog many of his lines. The 
enumerated objects in his catalogue or inventory 



POE AND WHITMAN 203 

poems often remain inert objects only. Like 
many mystics, lie was hypnotized by external 
phenomena, and lie often fails to communicate to 
his reader the trance-like emotion which he himself 
experienced. This imperfect transfusion of his 
material is a far more significant defect in Whit- 
man's poetry than the relatively few passages 
of unashamed sexuality which shocked the Ameri- 
can public in 1855. 

The gospel or burden of Leaves of Grass is no 
more difficult of comprehension than the general 
drift of Emerson's essays, which helped to inspire 
it. The starting-point of the book is a mystical 
illumination regarding the unity and blessedness 
of the universe, an insight passing understanding, 
but based upon the revelatory experience of love. 
In the light of this experience, all created things 
are recognized as divine. The starting-point and 
center of the WTiitman world is the individual 
man, the "strong person," imperturbable in mind, 
athletic in body, unconquerable, and immortal. 
Such individuals meet in comradeship, and pass 
together along the open roads of the world. No 
one is excluded because of his poverty or his sins; 
there is room in the ideal America for everybody 
except the doubter and sceptic. WTiitman does 



204 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

not linger over the smaller groups of human so- 
ciety, like the family. He is not a fireside poet. 
He passes directly from his strong persons, meeting 
freely on the open road, to his conception of "these 
States. " One of his typical visions of the breadth 
and depth and height of America will be found in 
By Blue Ontario's Shore. In this and in many 
similar rhapsodies Whitman holds obstinately to 
what may be termed the three points of his national 
creed. The first is the newness of America, and its 
expression is in his well-known chant of Pioneers, 
Pioneers. Yet this new America is subtly re- 
lated to the past; and in Whitman's later poems, 
such as Passage to India, the spiritual kinship of 
orient and Occident is emphasized. The second 
article of the creed is the unity of America. Here 
he voices the conceptions of Hamilton, Clay, Web- 
ster, and Lincoln. In spite of all diversity in 
external aspects the republic is "one and indivis- 
ible." This unity, in Whitman's view, was 
cemented forever by the issue of the Civil War. 
Lincoln, the "Captain," dies indeed on the deck 
of the "victor ship," but the ship comes into the 
harbor "with object won." Third and finally. 
Whitman insists upon the solidarity of America 
with all countries of the globe. Particularly in his 



POE AND WHITMAN 205 

yearning and thoughtful old age, the poet perceived 
that humanity has but one heart and that it should 
have but one will. No American poet has ever 
prophesied so directly and powerfully concerning 
the final issue involved in that World War which 
he did not live to see. 

WTiitman, like Poe, had defects of character and 
defects of art. His life and work raise many prob- 
lems which will long continue to fascinate and to 
haffte the critics. But after all of them have had 
their say, it will remain true that he was a seer 
and a prophet, far in advance of his own time, like 
Lincoln, and like Lincoln, an inspired interpreter of 
the soul of this republic. 



CHAPTER IX 



UNION AND LIBERTY 



"There is what I call the American idea," de- 
clared Theodore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Con- 
vention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the 
proximate organization thereof, a democracy — 
that is, a government of all the people, by all the 
people, for all the people; of course, a government 
on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging 
law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the 
idea of Freedom. " 

These are noble words, and they are thought 
to have suggested a familiar phrase of Lincoln's 
Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet 
students of literature, no less than students of 
politics, recognize the difficulty of summarizing 
in words a national "idea." Precisely what was 
the Greek "idea"? What is today the French 
"idea"? No single formula is adequate to express 
such a ccanplex of fact, theories, moods — not even 

208 



UNION AND LIBERTY 207 

the famous "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." 
The existence of a truly national life and literature 
presupposes a certain degree of unity, an integra- 
tion of race, language, political institutions, and 
social ideals. It is obvious that this problem of 
national integration meets peculiar obstacles in 
the United States. Divergencies of race, tradition, 
and social theory, and clashing interests of differ- 
ent sections have been felt from the beginning of 
the nation's life. There was well-nigh complete 
solidarity in the single province of New England 
during a portion of the seventeenth century, and 
under the leadership of the great Virginians there 
was sufficient national fusion to make the Revolu- 
tion successful. But early in the nineteenth 
century, the opening of the new West, and the 
increasing economic importance of Slavery as a 
peculiar institution of the South, provoked again 
the ominous question of the possibility of an endur- 
ing Union. From 1820 until the end of the Civil 
War, it was the chief political issue of the United 
States. The aim of the present chapter is to show 
how the theme of Union and Liberty affected our 
literature. 

To appreciate the significance of this theme we 
must remind ourselves again of what many per- 



208 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

sons have called the civic note in our national 
writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It 
is far removed from the pure literary art of a Poe, 
a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at action 
rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to 
convince, to bring things to pass. We shall ob- 
serve it in the oratory of Clay and Webster, as 
they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of 
Garrison, a foe to compromise and like Calhoun an 
advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in the epoch- 
making novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the 
speeches of Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot 
with political passion, and sermons blazing with the 
fury of attack and defense of principles dear to 
the human heart. We must glance, at least, at the 
lyrics produced by the war itself, and finally, we 
shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor 
of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, per- 
ceives and maintains, in the noblest tones of our 
civic speech, the sole conditions of our continu- 
ance as a nation. 

Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, 
and, as many besides Dickens have thought, an 
American defect. We cannot argue that question 
adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in the 
pioneer stages of our existence oratory was neces- 



UNION AND LIBERTY 209 

sary as a stimulus to communal thought and feel- 
ing. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel 
Adams were as essential to our winning independ- 
ence as the sessions of statesmen and the armed 
conflicts in the field. And in that new West which 
came so swiftly and dramatically into existence at 
the close of the Revolution, the orator came to be 
regarded as the normal type of intellectual leader- 
ship. The stump grew more potent than school- 
house and church and bench. 

The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic 
victim of this glorification of oratory was Henry 
Clay, "Harry of the West," the glamour of whose 
name and the wonderful tones of whose voice 
became for a while a part of the political system of 
the United States. Union and Liberty were the 
master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater of 
these was Union. The half -educated young im- 
migrant from Virginia hazarded his career at the 
outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the Ken- 
tucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable 
act of his life was his successful management, at 
the age of seventy-three, of the futile Compromise 
of 1850. All his life long he fought for national 
issues; for the War of 1812, for a protective tariff 
and an "American system," for the Missouri 



14 



210 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national 
safety; and he had plead generously for the young 
South American republics and for struggling 
Greece. He had become the perpetual candidate 
of his party for the Presidency, and had gone down 
again and again in unforeseen and heart-rending 
defeat. Yet he could say honorably: "If anyone 
desires to know the leading and paramount object 
of my public life, the preservation of this union 
will furnish him the key." One could wish that 
the speeches of this fascinating American were 
more readable today. They seem thin, facile, full 
of phrases — such adroit phrases as would catch the 
ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, 
hard thinking was not the road to political prefer- 
ment in Clay's day. Calhoun had that power, as 
Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity for it, 
although he was too indolent to employ his great 
gifts steadily. Yet it was Webster who analyzed 
kindly and a little sadly, for he was talking during 
Clay's last illness and just before his own, his old 
rival's defect in literary quality: **He was never a 
man of books .... I could never imagine him 
sitting comfortably in his library and reading 
quietly out of the great books of the past. He has 
been too fond of excitement — he has lived upon it; 



UNION AND LIBERTY 211 

he has been too fond of company, not enough 
alone; and has had few resources within himself. '* 
Were the limitations of a typical oratorical tem- 
perament ever touched more unerringly than in 
these words? 

When Webster himself thundered, at the close 
of his reply to Hayne in 1830, "Union and Liberty, 
now and forever, one and inseparable," the words 
sank deeper into the consciousness of the American 
people than any similar sentiment uttered by 
Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer, fuller 
nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past,'* 
brooding, as Lincoln was to brood later, over the 
seemingly insoluble problem of preserving a union 
of States half slave, half free. On the fateful 
seventh of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast 
the immense weight of his personality and prestige 
upon the side of compromise. It was the ruin of 
his political fortune, for the mood of the North 
was changing, and the South preferred other can- 
didates for the Presidency. Yet the worst that 
can fairly be said against that speech today is that 
it lacked moral imagination to visualize, as Mrs. 
Stowe was soon to visualize, the human results of 
slavery. As a plea for the transcendent necessity 
of maintaining the old Union it was consistent 



212 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

with Webster's whole development of political 
thought. 

What were the secrets of that power that held 
Webster's hearers literally spellbound, and made 
the North think of him, after that alienation of 
1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for 
we touch here the mysteries of personality and of 
the spoken word. But enough survives from the 
Webster legend, from his correspondence and 
political and legal oratory, to bring us into the 
presence of a superman. The dark Titan face, 
painted by such masters as Carlyle, Hawthorne, 
and Emerson; the magical voice, remembered now 
but by a few old men; the bodily presence, with its 
leonine suggestion of sleepy power only half put 
forth — these aided Webster to awe men or allure 
them into personal idolatry. Yet outside of New 
England he was admired rather than loved. There 
is still universal recognition of the mental capacity 
of this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman 
of his time. He was unsurpassed in his skill for 
direct, simple, limpid statement; but he could rise 
at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction, a 
splendid sonorousness of cadence. His greatest 
public appearances were in the Dartmouth College 
Case before the Supreme Court, the Plymouth, 



UNION AND LIBERTY 21S 

Blinker Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemora- 
tive orations, the Reply to Hayne, and the Seventh 
of March speeches in the Senate. Though he ex- 
hibiLed in his private life something of the prodigal 
recklessness of the pioneer, his mental opera- 
tions were conservative, constructive. His life- 
long antagonist Calhoun declared that "The 
United States are not a nation." Webster, in 
opposition to this theory of a confederation of 
states, devoted his superb talents to the demon- 
stration of the thesis that the United States "is/' 
not "are." Thus he came to be known as the 
typical expounder of the Constitution. When he 
reached, in 1850, the turning-point of his career, 
his countrymen knew by heart his personal and 
political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and 
education, the rise to mastery at the New England 
bar, the service in the House of Representatives 
and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His 
speeches were already in the schoolbooks, and for 
twenty years boys had been declaiming his argu- 
ments against nullification. He had helped to 
teach America to think and to feel. Indeed it was 
through his oratory that many of his fellow-citi- 
zens had gained their highest conception of the 
beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human 



214 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

speech. And in truth he never exhibited his logi- 
cal power and demonstrative skill more superbly 
than in the plea of the seventh of March for the 
preservation of the status quo, for the avoidance of 
mutual recrimination between North and South, 
for obedience to the law of the land. It was his 
supreme effort to reconcile an irreconcilable 
situation. 

It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, 
Theodore Parker, and indeed most of the voters of 
New England, believed that Webster had bartered 
his private convictions in the hope of securing the 
Presidential nomination in 1852. They assailed 
him savagely, and Webster died, a broken man, in 
the autumn of the Presidential year. "I have 
given my life to law and politics," he wrote to 
Professor Silliman. "Law is uncertain and poli- 
tics are utterly vain." The dispassionate judg- 
ment of the present hour frees him from the charge 
of conscious treachery to principle. He was rather 
a martyr to his own conception of the obligations 
imposed by nationality. When these obligations 
run counter to human realities, the theories of 
statesmen must give way. Emerson could not 
refute that logic of Webster's argument for the 
Fugitive Slave Law, but he could at least record 



UNION AND LIBERTY 215 

in his private Journal: "I will not obey it, by God!" 
So said hundreds of thousands of obscure men in 
the North, but Webster did not or could not hear 
them. 

While no other orator of that period was so richly 
endowed as Daniel Webster, the struggle for Union 
and Liberty enlisted on both sides many eloquent 
men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, mas- 
terly political theorizing can still be studied in 
speeches that have lost little of their effectiveness 
through the lapse of time. The years have dealt 
roughly with Edward Everett, once thought to be 
the pattern of oratorical gifts and graces. In 
commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked with 
Webster, but the dust is settling upon his learned 
and ornate pages. Rufus Choate, another con- 
servative Whig in politics, and a leader, like Wirt 
and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost 
Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and an 
intensity of emotion unrivaled among his con- 
temporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of 
Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti- 
Slavery orators, on the other hand, had the ad- 
vantage of a specific moral issue in which they led 
the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most pol- 
ished, the most consummate in his air of informal- 



216 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

ity, and his example did much to pmicture the 
American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was 
an expert in virulent denunciation, passionately 
unfair beneath his mask of conversational decorum, 
an aristocratic demagogue. He is still distrusted 
and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, 
still adored by the children and grandchildren of 
slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward Everett, 
seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the 
statues and portraits and massive volumes of 
erudite and caustic and high-minded orations. He 
may be seen at his best in such books as Long- 
fellow's Journal and Correspondence and the Life 
and Letters of George Tickhor. There one has 
a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and 
friend. But in his public speech he was arrogant, 
unsympathetic, domineering. "Sumner is my 
idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. 
There are bishops and bishops, however, and if 
Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln and hosts of 
other Americans admired, had only belonged to the 
Church of England, what an admirable Victorian 
bishop he might have made! Perhaps his best 
service to the cause of union was rendered by his 
speeches in England, where he fairly mobbed the 
mob and won them by his wit, courage, and by 



UNION AND LIBERTY 217 

his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's 
oratory, in and out of the pulpit, was tempera- 
mental, sentimental in the better sense, and 
admirably human in all its instincts. He had an 
immense following, not only in political and hu- 
manitarian fields, but as a lovable type of the 
everyday American who can say undisputed things 
not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference 
with an infectious smile. The people who loved 
Mr. Beecher are the people who understand Mr. 
Bryan. 

Foremost among the journalists of the great 
debate were WilHam Lloyd Garrison and Horace 
Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the 
successful journalist as described by Zola — the 
man who keeps on pounding at a single idea until 
he has driven it into the head of the public. Every- 
one knows at least the sentence from his salutatory 
editorial in The Liberator on January 1, 1831: "I 
am in earnest — I will not retreat a single inch — 
And I will he heard." He kept this vow, and he 
also kept the accompanying and highly charac- 
teristic promise: "I will be as harsh as truth and as 
uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do 
not wish to think, or write, or speak, with modera- 
tion." But there would be little political litera- 



218 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

ture in the world if its production were entrusted 
to the moderate type of man, and the files of The 
Liberator, though certainly harsh and full of all 
uncharitableness towards slave-owners, make ex- 
cellent reading for the twentieth century American 
who perceives that in spite of the triumph of 
emancipation, in which Garrison had his fair share 
of glory, many aspects of our race-problem remain 
unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and edi- 
tor of the New YorTc Tribune, was a farmer's boy 
who learned early to speak and write the vocabu- 
lary of the plain people. Always interested in new 
ideas, even in Transcendentalism and Fourierism, 
his courage and energy and journalistic vigor gave 
him leadership in the later phases of the movement 
for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to 
offer unasked advice to Lincoln on many occa- 
sions, and Lincoln enriched our literature by his 
replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatui- 
ties, but in his best days he had an impressively 
loyal following among both rural and city-bred 
readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best 
examples of that obsolescent personal journalism 
which is destined to disappear under modern 
conditions of newspaper production. Readers 
really used to care for "what Greeley said" and 



UNION AND LIBERTY 219 

"Dana said" and "Sam Bowles said," and all of 
these men, with scores of others, have left their 
stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our 
political WT-iting. 

In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it 
must be admitted that the most remarkable liter- 
ary victory was scored, not by any orator or journ- 
alist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the 
author of Uncle TonrCs Cabin. No American novel 
has had so curious a history and so great or so 
immediate an influence in this country and in 
Europe. In spite of all that has been written 
about it, its author's purpose is still widely mis- 
imderstood, particularly in the South, and the 
controversy over this one epoch-making novel has 
tended to obscure the Hterary reputation which 
Mrs. Stowe won by her other books. 

Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister 
of famous clergymen, was born in Litchfield, Con- 
necticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832 
to 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, 
within sight of slave territory, and in daily contact 
with victims of the slave system. While her sym- 
pathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, 
were anti-slavery, she was not an Abolitionist in 
the Garrisonian sense of that word. At twenty- 



220 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin 
Stowe, to whom she bore many children. She had 
written a few sketches of New England life, and 
her family thought her a woman of genius. Such 
was the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when 
the Stowes migrated to Brunswick, Maine, where 
the husband had been appointed to a chair at 
Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by house- 
hold cares which she had to face single-handed — 
for the Professor was a "feckless body" — Mrs. 
Stowe nevertheless could not be indifferent to the 
national crisis over the Fugitive Slave Law. She 
had seen its working. When her sister-in-law 
wrote to her: "If I could use a pen as you can, 
I would write something that would make this 
whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery 
is, " Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will 
write something; I will if I live." 

Uncle Tom^s Cabin, begun in the spring of 1850, 
was a woman's answer to Webster's seventh of 
March speech. Its object was plainly stated to 
be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the Afri- 
can race; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under 
a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to 
defeat and do away the good effects of all that can 
be attempted for them, by their best friends under 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 
Photograph by Black, Boston. 



HARRIET BEECH ER STOWE, 1853 
After the drawing hy George Richmond. 




CHARLES TWifNER 
Photograph from the collecfion of L. (". Hnnrl}-, Washington. 



220 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LTTETT \TTTIE 

five she had married a widowt , Calvin 

Stowe, to whom she bore many She had 

written a few sketches of Nev^ e, and 

her family thou|hther^a^y^^j. Such 

was the situation m the winter . when 

the tStowes migrated to BrunsvviL.:., _»,. " -Te 

the husband had been appointed to . „ at 

Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by house- 
hold cares which she had to face single-handed — 
for the Pr- feckless body'* — Mrs. 

Stowe r different to the 

national iji J-.'. • ' - '^''■ 

had seen its y _, 
wrote to her: "If I could use a y 
I would write something that would make this 
whole nati^if^^l^^9ia%3^^%iM^a^!feg slavery 
is, " Mrs. SiKWRerfoiJttaiffigdst^i^J^h^^ftl me, I will 
write something; I will if I live." 

Uncle Tom's Cabin^ begun in the sDriruf .^f 1^ - 
was a woman's answer to W. 
March speech. Its object t * 

b© "to awaken sympathy a r the Af ri- 

show i\' kii'rows, imder 

unjust as to 

., of all that can 

be atteL m, by their best friends under 

.noJsnidaaW r^bafiH .3 .1 \o noiJoalloo sAi taoi\ riqBisoiori^ 



i ii 






UNION AND LIBERTY 221 

it. " The book was permeated with what we now 
call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct 
heritage of the French Revolution. "There is a 
dies ircB coming on, sooner or later,'* admits St. 
Clare in the story. "The same thing is working, 
in Europe, in England, and in this country." 
There was no sectional hostility in Mrs. Stowe's 
heart. "The people of the free states have de- 
fended, encouraged, and participated [in slavery]; 
and are more guilty for it, before God, than the 
South, in that they have not the apology of educa- 
tion or custom. If the mothers of the free states 
had all felt as they should in times past, the sons 
of the free states would not have been the holders, 
and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; 
the sons of the free states would not have connived 
at the extension of slavery in our national body. " 
"Your book is going to be the great pacificator," 
wrote a friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North 
and South." But the distinctly Christian and 
fraternal intention of the book was swiftly for- 
gotten in the storm of controversy that followed 
its appearance. It had been written hastily, 
fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at Bruns- 
wick, had been printed as a serial in The National 
Era without attracting much attention, and was 



AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

issued in book form in March, 1852. Its sudden 
and amazing success was not confined to this 
country. The story ran in three Paris newspapers 
at once, was promptly dramatized, and has held 
the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon 
the Index in Italy, as being subversive of estab- 
lished authority. Millions of copies were sold in 
Europe, and Uncle Tom's Cabiny more than any 
other cause, held the English working men in 
sympathy with the North in the English cotton 
crisis of our Civil War. 

It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece 
and impossible not to recognize its excellencies. 
"If our art has not scope enough to include a book 
of this kind," said Madame George Sand, "we 
had better stretch the terms of our art a little." 
For the book proved to be, as its author had hoped, 
a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam 
and Andy, Miss Ophelia and Legree are alive. 
Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of Balzac's 
indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is 
a bit too good to be true, and readers no longer 
weep over the death of little Eva — nor, for that 
matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. 
There is some melodrama, some religiosity, and 
there are some absurd recognition scenes at the 



UNION AND LIBERTY 223 

close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius 
which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embod- 
ies in men and women the vast and ominous sys- 
tem of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, 
blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are here: 
neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian 
who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom him- 
self in the final act of his drama, can help himself. 
For good or evil they are the products and results 
of the system; and yet they have and they give 
the illusion of volition. 

Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel 
and short story, among them Dred, The Minister's 
Wooing, Oldtown Folks, Oldtown Fireside Stories. 
In the local short story she deserves the honors due 
to one of the pioneers, and her keen affectionate 
observation, her humor, and her humanity, would 
have given her a literary reputation quite inde- 
pendent of her masterpiece. But she is likely to 
pay the penalty of that astounding success, and to 
go down to posterity as the author of a single book. 
She would not mind this fate. 

The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the 
sectional struggle which was necessary before that 
idea could be realized in national policy is on the 
whole not commensurate with the significance of 



224 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

the issue itself. Any collection of American po- 
litical verse produced during this period exhibits 
spirited and sincere writing, but the combination 
of mature literary art and impressive general ideas 
is comparatively rare. There are single poems of 
Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every 
test of effective political and social verse, but the 
main body of poetry, both sectional and national, 
written during the thirty years ending with 1865 
lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The 
continental spaciousness and energy which foreign 
critics thought they discovered in Whitman is not 
characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor 
Hugo and Shelley and Swinburne have written far 
more magnificent republican poetry than ours. The 
passion for freedom has been very real upon this side 
of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the 
men who sang Dixie as well as in their antagonists 
who chanted John BrowrCs Body and The Battle 
Hymn of the Republic; but this passion has not yet 
lifted and ennobled any notable mass of American 
verse. Even the sentiment of union was more 
adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and 
orations, even in a short story — Edward Everett 
Hale's Man Without a Country — than by most of 
the poets who attempted to glorify that theme. 



UNION AND LIBERTY 225 

Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is 
rich in provincial and sectional loyalties. It has 
earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no 
adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither 
the words nor the music of The Star-Spangled 
Banner fully express what we feel while we are 
trying to sing it, as the Marseillaise, for example, 
does express the very spirit of revolutionary repub- 
licanism. But in true pioneer fashion we get along 
with a makeshift until something better turns up. 
The lyric and narrative verse of the Civil War it- 
self was great in quantity, and not more inferior 
in quality than the war verse of other nations has 
often proved to be when read after the immediate 
occasion for it has passed. Single lyrics by Tim- 
rod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell, Read, 
Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet 
Mrs. Howe's Battle Hymn, scribbled hastily in the 
gray dawn, interpreted, as no other lyric of the 
war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical 
glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in 
camp; women read it with tears; children repeated 
it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving in it, as 
their fathers had perceived in Webster's Reply to 
Hayne thirty years before, the idea of union made 
*' simple, sensuous, passionate." No American 



IS 



226 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

poem has had a more dramatic and intense life 
in the quick breathing imagination of men. 

More and more, however, the instinct of our 
people is turning to the words of Abraham Lin- 
coln as the truest embodiment in language, as his 
life was the truest embodiment in action, of our 
national ideal. It is a curious reversal of contemp- 
orary judgments that thus discovers in the homely 
phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect liter- 
ary expression of the deeper spirit of his time. 
"How knoweth this man letters, having never 
learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is 
that he had learned in a better school than the 
East afforded. The story of Lincoln's life is happi- 
ly too familiar to need retelling here, but some of 
the elements in his growth in the mastery of speech 
may at least be summarized. 

Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of 
intense concentration. It was characteristic of 
him that he rarely took notes when trying a law 
case, saying that the notes distracted his atten- 
tion. When his partner Herndon was asked when 
Lincoln had found time to study out the constitu- 
tional history of the United States, Herndon ex- 
pressed the opinion that it was when Lincoln was 
lying on his back on the office sofa, apparently 



UNION AND LIBERTY 227 

watching the flies upon the ceiling. This com- 
bination of bodily repose with intense mental and 
spiritual activity is familiar to those who have 
studied the biography of some of the great mystics. 
Walter Pater pointed it out in the case of Words- 
worth. 

In recalling the poverty and restriction of 
Lincoln's boyhood and his infrequent contact with 
schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he man- 
aged nevertheless to read every book within twenty 
miles of him. These were not many, it is true, but 
they included The Bible, Mso'p's Fables, Pilgrim's 
Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and, a little later. Burns 
and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the 
mind of a boy has never been found. Then he 
came to the history of his own country since the 
Declaration of Independence and mastered it. 
"I am tolerably well acquainted with the history 
of the country, " he remarked in his Chicago speech 
of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 
he exhibited a familiarity with the theory and his- 
tory of the Constitution which amazed the young 
lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the 
address. " He has wit, facts, dates, " said Douglas, 
in extenuation of his own disinclination to enter 
upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas 



228 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

returned to Washington after the debates were 
over, he confessed to the young Henry Watterson 
that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met, 
either here or anywhere else. " Douglas had won 
the senatorship and could afford to be generous, 
but he knew well enough that his opponent's 
facts and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's 
mental grip, indeed, was the grip of a born wrestler. 
"I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the end 
of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, 
as Douglas was called, had turned and twisted in 
vain, caught by "that long-armed creature from 
Illinois." He could indeed win the election of 
1858, but he had been forced into an interpretation 
of the Dred Scott decision which cost him the 
Presidency in 1860. 

Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, 
his patience in searching the dictionary, is known to 
every student of his life. Part of his singular dis- 
j crimination in the use of language is due to his 
legal training, but his style was never profession- 
alized. Neither did it have anything of that fron- 
tier glibness and banality which was the curse of 
popular oratory in the West and South. Words 
were weapons in the hands of this self-taught 
fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and 



UNION AND LIBERTY 229 

could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. 
He framed the "Freeport dilemma" for the un- 
wary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a fox-hunter 
lays his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an 
earlier effort, "Judge Douglas informed you that 
this speech of mine was probably carefully pre- 
pared. I admit that it was.'* 

The story, too, was a weapon of attack and de- 
fense for this master fabulist. Sometimes it was a 
readier mode of argument than any syllogism; 
sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplo- 
matist's pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while 
he studied his adversary or made up his own mind; 
sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he 
invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic 
setting "over in Sangamon County." For al- 
though upon his intellectual side the man was a 
subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side 
he was a lover of the concrete and human. He was 
always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing 
"a man" who symbolized something apposite 
to the occasion. Thus even his invented stories 
aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for 
specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's 
destiny was to be that of an explainer, at first to a 
local audience in store or tavern or courtroom, 



230 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

then to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers 
who wished to hear national issues made clear to 
them, then to a listening nation in the agony of 
civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks 
to Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the 
essence of democracy. 

As the audience increased, the style took on 
beauty and breadth, as if the man*s soul were 
looking through wider and wider windows at the 
world. But it always remained the simplest of 
styles. In an offhand reply to a serenade by an 
Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting depu- 
tation of clergymen at the White House, Lincoln 
could summarize and clarify a complicated na- 
tional situation with an ease and orderliness and 
fascination that are the despair of professional 
historians. He never wasted a word. " Go to work 
is the only cure for your case," he wrote to John 
D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sen- 
tence and none of over four letters. The Gettys- 
burg Address contains but two hundred and seventy 
words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure, " said 
Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who 
had delivered "the" oration of that day, wrote to 
the President: "I should be glad if I could flatter 
myself that I came as near to the central idea of 



UNION AND LIBERTY 231 

the occasion in two hours as you did in two min- 
utes." Today the Address reads as if Lincoln 
knew that it would ultimately be stamped in 
bronze. 

Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our 
distinctly civic literature lies not so much in his 
skill in the manipulation of language, consummate 
as that was, but rather in those large elements of 
his nature which enabled him to perceive the true 
quality and ideal of American citizenship and its 
significance to the world. There was melancholy 
in that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; 
there was mysticism and a sense of religion 
which steadily deepened as his responsibilities 
increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, 
pity for the sorrowful, patience for the slow of 
brain and heart, and an expectation for the 
future of humanity which may best be described 
in the old phrase "waiting for the Kingdom of 
God." His recurrent dream of the ship coming 
into port under full sail, which preluded many 
important events in his own life — he had it the 
night before he was assassinated — is significant 
not only of that triumph of a free nation which he 
helped to make possible, but also of the victory of 
what he loved to call "the whole family of man." 



232 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

"That is the real issue," he had declared in closing 
the debates with Douglas; "that is the issue that 
will continue in this country when these poor 
tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be 
silent. It is the eternal struggle between these 
two principles — right and wrong — throughout 
the world. They are the two principles that have 
stood face to face from the beginning of time; and 
will ever continue to struggle. The one is the 
common right of humanity, and the other the 
divine right of kings. " 

For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, de- 
veloped under purely American conditions, matur- 
ing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the 
old English saint, while he was "still learning," 
had none of the typical hardness and selfishness 
of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he 
was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world 
dreaming on things to come," with sympathies 
and imagination that reached out beyond the 
immediate urgencies of his race and nation to 
comprehend the universal task and discipline of 
the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy 
this Westerner was not only far in advance of his 
own day, but he is also far in advance of ours which 
raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used 



UNION AND LIBERTY 233 

to loneliness and to the long view, and even across 
the welter of the World War of the twentieth cen- 
tury Lincoln would be tall enough to see that ship 
coming into the harbor under full sail. 



CHAPTER X 



A NEW NATION 



The changes that have come over the inner spirit 
and the outward expression of American life 
since Lincoln's day are enough to startle the curi- 
osity of the dullest observer. Yet they have 
been accomplished within the lifetime of a single 
man of letters. The author of one of the many 
campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was Wil- 
liam Dean Howells, then an Ohio journalist of 
twenty-three. Li 1917, at the age of eighty, Mr. 
Howells is still adding to his long row of charming 
and memorable books. Every phase of American 
writing since the middle of the last century has 
fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this 
loyal follower of the art of literature. As producer, 
editor, critic, and friend of the foremost writers of 
his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the books of our 
new national era as no one else could have known 
them. Some future historian of the period may 

234 



A NEW NATION 235 

piece together, from no other sources than Mr. 
Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our 
book-making during more than sixty years. All 
that the present historian can attempt is to sketch 
with bungling fingers a few men and a few ten- 
dencies which seem to characterize the age. 

One result of the Civil War was picturesquely 
set forth in Emerson's Journal. The War had 
unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it 
in every man's house. There was a universal 
shifting of attention, if not always from the pro- 
vince or section to the image of the nation itself, 
at least a shift of focus from one section to another. 
The clash of arms had meant many other things 
besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of 
the slaves. It had brought men from every state 
into rude jostling contact with one another and 
had developed a new social and human curiosity. 
It may serve as another illustration of Professor 
Shaler's law of tension and release. The one 
overshadowing issue which had absorbed so much 
thought and imagination and energy had suddenly 
disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of 
course. Reconstruction of the South was one of 
them, and the vast economic and industrial changes 
that followed the opening of the New West were to 



236 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

bring fresh problems almost as intricate as the 
question of slavery had been. But for the moment 
no one thought of these things. The South ac- 
cepted defeat as superbly as she had fought, and 
began to plough once more. The jubilant North 
went back to work — to build transcontinental 
railroads, to organize great industries, and to 
create new states. 

The significant American literature of the first 
decade after the close of the War is not in the 
books dealing directly with themes involved in the 
War itself. It is rather the literature of this new 
release of energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto 
unknown sections, the new humor and romance. 
Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable 
History of American Literature since 1870, uses 
scarcely too strong a phrase when he entitles this 
period "The Second Discovery of America"; and 
he quotes effectively from Mark Twain, who was 
himself one of these discoverers : "The eight years 
in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions 
that were centuries old, changed the politics of a 
people, transformed the social life of half the 
country, and wrought so profoundly upon the 
entire national character that the influence cannot 
be measured short of two or three generations. '* 



A NEW NATION 237 

Let us begin with the West, and with that joy- 
ous stage-coach journey of young Samuel L. 
Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, 
which he describes in Roughing It. Who was this 
Argonaut of the new era, and what makes him 
representative of his countrymen in the epoch of 
release? Born in Missouri in 1835, the son of an 
impractical emigrant from Virginia, the youth had 
lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year on 
the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the 
printer's trade, had wandered east and back again, 
had served for four years as a river-pilot on the 
Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate 
army. Then came the six crowded years, chiefly 
as newspaper reporter, in the boom times of Ne- 
vada and California. His fame began with the 
publication in New York in 1867 of The Celebrated 
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. A newspaper 
now sent him to Europe to record "what he sees 
with his own eyes." He did so in Innocents 
Abroad, and his countrymen shouted with laughter. 
This, then, was "Europe'* after all — another 
"fake" until this shrewd river-pilot who signed 
himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then 
came a series of far greater books — Roughing It, 
Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age (in colla- 



238 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

boration), and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn 
— books that make our American Odyssey, rich in 
the spirit of romance and revealing the magic of 
the great river as no other pages can ever do again. 
Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; 
he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a 
fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed his honor- 
ary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every reader 
of American periodicals came to recognize the 
photographs of that thick shock of hair, those 
heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little figure, 
the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these 
things seemed to go with the part of professional 
humorist, to be like the caressing drawl of Mark's 
voice. The force of advertisement could no fur- 
ther go. But at bottom he was far other than a 
mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with 
frontier preferences in humor. He was a passion- 
ate, chivalric lover of things fair and good, al- 
though too honest to pretend to see beauty and 
goodness where he could not personally detect 
them — and an equally passionate hater of evil. 
Read The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyhurg and 
The Mysterious Stranger. In his last years, torn 
by private sorrows, he turned as black a philo- 
sophical pessimist as we have bred. He died at 



WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
Photograph. 



SAMUEL L. CLEMENS. "MARK TWAIN' 
Photograph by Sarony, New York. 



hoTatlon)ya,nd Tom Sawyc ' ' yry Finn 

— books that make our Am^ ^t-i ..% 

tJie spirit of romance and re^ 
the great river as no other pagi 
GraduaUy Mark Twain became a public character 
he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of 4. 
fortune earned oy fiis Do^s^T^^"^^^oyed his honor 
ary D. Litt. from ChfeM^fiversity. Every reader 
of Americrnn Drriodicals came to recognize the 
ph' hick shock of hair, .those 

ooping little figure, 
the ^iinkiu, 11 these 

voice. The force of advei.^ ., „ 

ther go. But at bottom he was far other than a 
mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with 
frontier preferences in humor. He was a passion- 
ate, chivalric lover of things fair an al- 
"' ^-'-^ too honest to r--^*- ^ ^ '' "^- , -<nd 
;^^-.''^'^^' f^^^^" ,?>viaitaAo .J aaiiijLkaj;. ^-: .-a 
them— H'!f???^.5^?^ 4?fii*s ^d dqjeagatodic hater of evil. 
Read The Man Who Corrupted Eadlei/burg and 
The M Stranger. In his last years, torn 
by privcili , he turned as black a philo- 
sophical pe.v:,i!' .- iis we have bred. He died at 



A NEW NATION 289 

his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. Mr. 
Paine has written his life in three great volumes, 
and there is a twenty-five volume edition of his 
Works. 

All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the ver- 
dict of the public seems not quite made up. It 
is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is 
gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist. The 
inexhaustible American appetite for frontier types 
of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches 
it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away. 
John Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill 
Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill 
Nye — these are already obsolescent names. If 
Clemens lacked something of Artemus Ward's 
whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's tested 
human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors 
in a certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of 
river and mining-camp and priuting-oflBce, where 
men speak without censorship. His country -men 
liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they 
liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast 
in Innocents Abroad. As a professional humorist, 
he has paid the obligatory tax for his extrava- 
gance, over-emphasis, and undisciplined taste, but 
such faults are swiftly forgotten when one turns 



240 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

to Huckleberry Finn and the negro Jim and Pudd'n- 
head Wilson, when one feels Mark Twain's power 
in sheer description and episode, his magic in 
evoking landscape and atmosphere, his blazing 
scorn at injustice and cruelty, his contempt for 
quacks. 

Bret Harte, another discoverer of the West, wears 
less well than Mark Twain as a personal figure, but 
has a sure place in the evolution of the American 
short story, and he did for the mining-camps of 
California what Clemens wrought for the Missis- 
sippi River : he became their profane poet. Yet he 
was never really of them. He was the clever out- 
sider, with a prospector's eye, looking for literary 
material, and finding a whole rich mine of it — a 
bigger and richer, in fact, than he was really quali- 
fied to work. But he located a golden vein of it 
with an instinct that did credit to his dash of 
Hebrew blood. Born in Albany, a teacher's son, 
brought up on books and in many cities, Harte 
emigrated to California in 1854 at the age of six- 
teen. He became in turn a drug-clerk, teacher, 
type-setter, editor, and even Secretary of the Cali- 
fornia Mint — his nearest approach, apparently, to 
the actual work of the mines. In 1868, while 
editor of The Overland Monthly, he wrote the short 



A NEW NATION 241 

story which was destined to make him famous in 
the East and to release him from California for- 
ever. It was The Luck of Roaring Camp. He had 
been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse 
for years; he had steeped himself in Dickens, like 
everybody else in the eighteen-sixties; and now he 
saw his pay -gravel shining back into his own shin- 
ing eyes. It was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a 
lead, but Bret Harte worked to the end of his 
career this material furnished by the camps, this 
method of the short story. He never returned to 
California after his joyous exit in 1871. For a 
few years he tried living in New York, but from 
1878 until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in 
Europe, still turning out California stories for an 
English and American public which insisted upon 
that particular pattern. 

That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, 
sentimental, somewhat meretricious in design, in 
a word insincere like its inventor, has been re- 
peated at due intervals ever since 1868. The 
charge is true; yet it is far from the whole truth 
concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of 
the technique of the short story he is fairly com- 
parable wath Poe, though less original, for it was 
Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child 



i6 



242 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

of six, the well-known theory of the unity of eflFect 
of the brief tale. This unity Harte secured 
through a simplification, often an insulation, of his 
theme, the omission of quarreling details, an at- 
mosphere none the less novel for its occasional 
theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated 
to the one note they were intended to strike. 
Tennessee's Partner, The Outcast of Poker Flat, and 
all the rest are triumphs of selective skill — as 
bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at the 
end of a hard day's labor. That they do not ade- 
quately represent the actual California of the 
fifties, as old Californians obstinately insisf, is 
doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is 
no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few 
pages : Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and Dick- 
ens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, 
with Dickensy characters and consistently ro- 
mantic action. 

The West has been rediscovered many a time 
since that decade which witnessed the first liter- 
ary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. 
It will continue to be discovered, in its fresh 
sources of appeal to the imagination, as long as 
Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as 
there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is 



GEORGE W. CABLE 
Photograph. 




BRET HARTE 
Photograph. 




SIDNEY LANIER 
Photograph. 



248 AMEltirAN SPIRIT TORE 

of , xn theory c ■ of effect 

of the brief tale. This ue secured 

through a simplJfit^fe,.-^%§?a^^g ' ^^^ 

theme, the omission .§>|^^^a^ ' aJj 

mosphere none the less novei .. ' 

theatricaiity, and characters cunui 
to the one note they were intende 
Tennessee's JPaHnefy The Outcast of Poker Flaty and 
all the rest fiufe triumphs of selective skiU — as 

bri ' ' '" ' ' ^" the pan at the 

•:n' ;Io not ade- 

fifties, as old Ce 
doubtless tme, but it is fv 
no Tolstoi paintinf^l^^ B^^^ 
pages: Harte is simpi$J^^M?ipi«; . ^ ^^< «-^' - 
ens, turning the Poe construction trick graceli 
yn^h Dickensy characters and consistenth 
action. 



long i 
0, as long £ 
ftaiVLJbSjvuavicLmant horizon. It i 

.dqBT^oioAl 



A NEW NATION 243 

not places that lose romantic interest: the imme- 
morial English counties and the Bay of Naples 
offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after 
generation. What is lost is the glamour of youth, 
the specific atmosphere of a given historical epoch. 
Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified 
to millions of American boys the great period of 
the Plains, with its Indian fighting, its slaughter of 
buffaloes, its robbing of stage-coaches, its superb 
riders etched against the sky. But the Wild 
West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel 
Boone and Davy Crockett. The West of the cow- 
boys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister 
knew it and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, 
has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and 
on the screen. 

Jack London, born in California in 1876, was 
forced to find his West in Alaska — and in alcohol. 
He was what he and his followers liked to call the 
virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the " Call 
of the Wild," "living life naked and tensely." In 
his talk Jack London was simple and boyish, with 
plenty of humor over his own literary and social 
foibles. His books are very uneven, but he wrote 
many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. If the Bret 
Harte theory of the West was that each man is at 



244 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

bottom a sentimentalist, Jack London's formula 
was that at bottom every man is a brute. Each 
theory gave provender enough for a short-story 
writer to carry on his back, but is hardly adequate, 
by itself, for a very long voyage over human life. 

"Joaquin" (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, who was 
born in 1841 and died in 1913, had even less of a 
formula for the West than Jack London. He was 
a word-painter of its landscapes, a rider over its 
surfaces. Cradled "in a covered wagon pointing 
West, " mingling with wild frontier life from Alaska 
to Nicaragua, miner, Indian fighter, hermit, poseur 
in London and Washington, then hermit again in 
California, the author of Songs of the Sierras at 
least knew his material. Byron, whom he adored 
and imitated, could have invented nothing more 
romantic than Joaquin's life; but though Joaquin 
inherited Scotch intensity, he had nothing of the 
close mental grip of the true Scot and nothing of 
his humor. Vast stretches of his poetry are empty; 
some of it is grandiose, elemental, and yet somehow 
artificial, as even the Grand Canyon itself looks at 
certain times. 

John Muir, another immigrant Scot who reached 
California in 1868, had far more stuff in him than 
Joaquin Miller. He had studied geology, botany. 



A NEW NATION 245 

and chemistry at the new University of Wisconsin, 
and then for years turned explorer of forests, 
peaks, and glaciers, not writing, at first, except in 
his Journal^ but forever absorbing and worshiping 
sublimity and beauty with no thought of literary 
schemes. Yet his every-day talk about his favor- 
ite trees and glaciers had more of the glow of poetry 
in it than any talk I have ever heard from men of 
letters, and his books and Journal will long per- 
petuate this thrilling sense of personal contact with 
wild, clean, uplifted things — blossoms in giant 
tree-tops and snow-eddies blowing round the 
shoulders of Alaskan peaks. Here is a West as 
far above Jack London's and Frank Norris's as 
the snow-line is higher than the jungle. 

The rediscovery of the South was not so much 
an exploration of fresh or forgotten geographical 
territory, as it was a new perception of the roman- 
tic human material offered by a peculiar civiliza- 
tion. Political and social causes had long kept 
the South in isolation. A few writers like Wirt, 
Kennedy, Longstreet, Simms, had described vari- 
ous aspects of its life with grace or vivacity, but 
the best picture of colonial Virginia had been drawn, 
after all, by Thackeray, who had merely read about 
it in books. Visitors like Fanny Kemble and 



246 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

Frederick Law Olmsted sketched the South of 
the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than did 
the sons of the soil. There was no real literary 
public in the South for a native writer like Simms. 
He was as dependent upon New York and the 
Northern market as a Virginian tobacco-planter of 
1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen 
years after the close of the War and culminating 
in the eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and 
varied harvest of Southern writing, notably in the 
field of fiction. The public for these stories, it is 
true, was still largely in the North and West, and 
it was the magazines and publishing-houses of 
New York and Boston that gave the Southern 
authors their chief stimulus and support. It was 
one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of the 
new nation. 

The romance of the Spanish and French civiliza- 
tion of New Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable's 
fascinating Old Creole Days, was recognized, not 
as something merely provincial in its significance, 
but as contributing to the infinitely variegated 
pattern of our national life. Irwin Russell, Joel 
Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page por- 
trayed in verse and prose the humorous, pathetic, 
unique traits of the Southern negro, a type hitherto 



A NEW NATION 247 

chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers. 
Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score 
of other artists began to draw affectionate pic- 
tures of the vanished Southern mansion of planta- 
tion days, when all the women were beautiful and 
all the men were brave, when the very horses were 
more spirited and the dogs lazier and the honey- 
suckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing 
than today. Miss Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") 
charmed city-dwellers and country-folk alike by 
her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James 
Lane Allen painted lovingly the hemp-fields and 
pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of 
the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete 
triumph of dialect and local color, and this move- 
ment, so full of interest to students of the immense 
divergence of American types, owed much of its 
vitality to the talent of Southern writers. 

But the impulse spread far beyond the South. 
Early in the seventies Edward Eggleston wrote 
The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Circuit Rider, 
faithful and moving presentations of genuine pio- 
neer types which were destined to pass with 
the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb 
Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, 
who frequented The Old Stoimmin' Hole and re- 



248 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

joiced When the Frost is on the Punkin. It was the 
era of Denman Thompson's plays, Joshua Whit- 
comb and The Old Homestead. Both the homely 
and the exotic marched under this banner of local 
color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards 
and cornfields, Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the 
romance of the Mission Indian in Ramona, and 
Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resi- 
dent of New Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen 
of Japan, tantalized American readers with his 
Chinese Ghosts and Chita. A fascinating period it 
seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted 
until about the end of the century, when the sud- 
denly discovered commercial value of the historical 
novel and the ensuing competition in best sellers 
misled many a fine artistic talent and coarsened 
the public taste. The New South then played the 
literary market as recklessly as the New West. 

Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of 
literature," as a witty New Yorker once charac- 
terized New England, The last quarter of the 
nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct 
influence of that province over the country as a 
whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of 
its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sag- 
ging under the weight of immense immigrations 



A NEW NATION 249 

from Europe, its political importance growing 
more and more negligible, that ancient promontory 
of ideas has continued to lose its relative literary 
significance. In one field of literature only has 
New England maintained its rank since the Civil 
War, and that is in the local short story. Here 
women have distinguished themselves beyond the 
proved capacity of New England men. Mrs. 
Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of demo- 
cratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Har- 
riet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 
women with nerves; and finally the three artists 
who have written, out of the material offered by a 
decadent New England, as perfect short stories as 
France or Russia can produce — Sarah Orne Jewett, 
Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These 
gifted writers portrayed, with varying technique 
and with singular differences in their instinctive 
choice of material, the dominant qualities of an 
isolated, in-bred race, still proud in its decline; 
still inquisitive and acquisitive, versatile yet stub- 
born, with thrift passing over into avarice, and 
mental power degenerating into smartness; cold 
and hard under long repression of emotion, yet 
capable of passion and fanaticism; at worst, a 
mere trader, a crank, a grim recluse; at best, en- 



250 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

dowed with an austere physical and moral beauty. 
Miss Jewett preferred to touch graciously the 
sunnier slopes of this provincial temperament, 
to linger in its ancient dignities and serenities. 
Miss Brown has shown the pathos of its thwarted 
desires, its hunger for a beauty and a happiness 
denied. Mary Wilkins Freeman revealed its 
fundamental tragedies of will. 

Two of the best known writers of New England 
fiction in this period were not natives of the soil, 
though they surpassed most native New England- 
ers in their understanding of the type. They were 
William Dean Howells and Henry James. Mr. 
Ho wells, who, in his own words, "can reasonably 
suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, 
German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so 
typically American," came to "the Holy Land at 
Boston" as a "passionate pilgrim from the West. " 
A Boy's Town, My Literary Passions, and Years 
of my Youth make clear the image of the young 
poet- journalist who returned from his four years 
in Venice and became assistant editor of The At- 
lantic Monthly in 1866. In 1871 he succeeded 
Fields in the editorship, but it was not until after 
his resignation in 1881 that he could put his full 
strength into those realistic novels of contempor- 



A NEW NATION 251 

ary New England which established his fame as a 
writer. A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas 
Lapham are perhaps the finest stories of this 
group; and the latter novel may prove to be Mr. 
Howells's chief "visiting-card to posterity. " We 
cannot here follow him to New York and to a new 
phase of novel writing, begun with A Hazard of 
New Fortunes, nor can we discuss the now anti- 
quated debate upon realism which was waged in 
the eighteen-eighties over the books of Howells 
and James. We must content ourselves with 
saying that a knowledge of Mr. Howells's work is 
essential to the student of the American provincial 
novel, as it is also to the student of our more 
generalized types of story-writing, and that he 
has never in his long career written an insincere, a 
slovenly, or an infelicitous page. My Literary 
Friends and Acquaintance gives the most charming 
picture ever drawn of the elder Cambridge, Con- 
cord, and Boston men who ruled over our literature 
when young Howells came out of the West, and 
My Mark Twain is his memorable portrait of an- 
other type of sovereign, perhaps the dynasty that 
will rule the future. 

Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote 
at one time acute studies of New England char- 



252 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

acter, lie was never, in his relations to that section, 
or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly 
London, anything more than a "visiting mind." 
His grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. 
His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and 
wit, a man of comfortable fortune, who lived 
at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but 
who was residing in New York when his son Henry 
was bom in 1843. No child was ever made the 
subject of a more complete theory of deracination. 
Transplanted from city to city, from country to 
coimtry, without a family or a voting-place, with- 
out college or church or creed or profession or 
responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent 
ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came 
to be the very pattern of a cosmopolitan. Avoid- 
ing his native country for nearly thirty years and 
then returning for a few months to write some 
intricate pages about that American Scene which 
he understood far less truly than the average 
immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just 
renounced his American citizenship and become a 
British subject in order to show his sympathy 
with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole 
evidence of political emotion in a lifetime of 
seventy-three years. 









HENRY JAMES 
Painting by Blanche, exhibited in the Salon, Paris, 1909. 



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A NEW NATION 253 

American writing men are justly proud, never- 
theless, of this expatriated craftsman. The Ameri- 
can is inclined to admire good workmanship of any- 
kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism 
of it. The task of really understanding Henry 
James has been left chiefly to clever women and 
to a few critics, but ever since A Passionate Pilgrim 
and Roderick Hudson appeared in 1875, it has 
been recognized that here was a master, in his 
own fashion. What that fashion is may now 
be known by anyone who will take the pains to 
read the author's prefaces to the New York edition 
of his revised works. Never, not even in the 
Paris which James loved, has an artist put his 
intentions and his seK-criticism more definitively 
upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told 
plainly enough here: a specially equipped intelli- 
gence, a freedom from normal responsibilities, 
a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, 
as life unfolded its complexities and nuances 
before his vision, an increasing passion to seek 
the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, a 
beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, 
stories that must be hinted at rather than told, 
raptures that exist for the initiated only. The 
much discussed early and middle and later man- 



254 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

ners of James are only various campaigns of this 
one questing spirit, changing his procedure as the 
elusive object of his search hid itself by this or 
that device of protective coloration or swift escape. 
It is as if a collector of rare butterflies had one 
method of capturing them in Madagascar, another 
for the Orinoco, and still another for Japan — 
though Henry James found his Japan and Orinoco 
and Madagascar all in London town! 

No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing 
him discourse about the art of fiction can forget the 
absolute seriousness of his professional devotion; 
it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and 
explain, with mystical intensity and a mystic's 
involution and reversal of all the values of vulgar 
speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. 
His own power as a creative artist was not always 
commensurate with his intellectual endowment or 
with his desire after beauty, and his frank con- 
tempt for the masses of men made it diflficult 
for him to write English. He preferred, as did 
Browning, who would have liked to reach the 
masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increas- 
ingly after he was fifty. It was a dialect capable 
of infinite gradations of tone, endless refinements 
of expression. In his threescore books there are 



A NEW NATION ^55 

delicious poignant moments where the spirit of life 
itself flutters like a wild creature, half -caught, half- 
escaping. It is for the beauty and thrill of these 
moments that the pages of Henry James will 
continue to be cherished by a few thousand readers 
scattered throughout the Republic to which he 
was ever an alien. 

No poet of the new era has won the national 
recognition enjoyed by the veterans. It will be 
recalled that Bryant survived until 1878, Long- 
fellow and Emerson until 1882, Lowell until 1891, 
Whittier and Whitman until 1892, and Holmes 
until 1894. Compared with these men the younger 
writers of verse seemed overmatched. The Na- 
tional Ode for the Centennial celebration in 1876 
was intrusted to Bayard Taylor, a hearty person, 
author of capital books of travel, plentiful verse, 
and a skilful translation of Faust. But an ade- 
quate National Ode was not in him. Sidney 
Lanier, who was writing in that year his Psalm of 
the West and was soon to compose The Marshes of 
Glynn, had far more of the divine fire. He was a 
bookish Georgia youth who had served with 
the Confederate army, and afterward, with broken 
health and in dire poverty, gave his brief life to 
music and poetry. He had rich capacities for 



256 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

both arts, but suffered in both from the lack of 
discipline and from an impetuous, restless imagi- 
nation which drove him on to over-ambitious 
designs. Whatever the flaws in his affluent verse, 
it has grown constantly in popular favor, and 
he is, after Poe, the best known poet of the South. 
The late Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose 
American Anthology and critical articles upon 
American poets did so much to enhance the 
reputation of other men, was himself a maker of 
ringing lyrics and spirited narrative verse. His 
later days were given increasingly to criticism, and 
his Life and Letters is a storehouse of material 
bearing upon the growth of New York as a liter- 
ary market-place during half a century. Richard 
Watson Gilder was another admirably fine figure, 
poet, editor, and leader of public opinion in many 
a noble cause. His Letters, likewise, give an inti- 
mate picture of literary New York from the seven- 
ties to the present. Through his editorship of 
Scribner's Monthly and The Century Magazine 
his sound influence made itself felt upon writers 
in every section. His own lyric vein had an opal- 
ine intensity of fire, but in spite of its glow his 
verse sometimes refused to sing. 

The most perfect poetic craftsman of the period 



A NEW NATION 257 

— and, many think, our one faultless worker in 
verse — was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His first 
volume of juvenile verse had appeared in 1855, 
the year of Whittier's Barefoot Boy and Whitman's 
Leaves of Grass. By 1865 his poems were printed 
in the then well-known Blue and Gold edition, by 
Ticknor and Fields. In 1881 he succeeded How- 
ells in the editorship of the Atlantic. Aldrich had 
a versatile talent that turned easily to adroit prose 
tales, but his heart was in the filing of his verses. 
Nothing so daintily perfect as his lighter pieces 
has been produced on this side of the Atlantic, 
and the deeper notes and occasional darker ques- 
tionings of his later verse are embodied in lines of 
impeccable workmanship. Aloof from the social 
and political conflicts of his day, he gave himself 
to the fastidious creation of beautiful lines, believ- 
ing that the beautiful line is the surest road to 
Arcady, and that Herrick, whom he idolized, 
had shown the way. 

To some readers of these pages it may seem like 
profanation to pass over poets like Sill, George 
Woodberry, Edith Thomas, Richard Hovey, Wil- 
liam Vaughn Moody, Madison Cawein — to men- 
tion but half a dozen distinguished names out of a 
larger company — and to suggest that James Whit- 



17 



258 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

comb Riley, more completely than any American 
poet since Longfellow, succeeded in expressing 
the actual poetic feelings of the men and women 
who composed his immense audience. Riley, like 
Aldrich, went to school to Herrick, Keats, Tenny- 
son, and Longfellow, but when he began writing 
newspaper verse in his native Indiana he was 
guided by two impulses which gave individuality 
to his work. "I was always trying to write of the 
kind of people I knew, and especially to write 
verse that I could read just as if it were spoken 
for the first time." The first impulse kept him 
close to the wholesome Hoosier soil. The second 
is an anticipation of Robert Frost's theory of 
speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a 
revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own 
poems. For Riley had much of the actor and 
platform-artist in him, and comprehended that 
poetry might be made again a spoken art, directed 
to the ear rather than to the eye. His vogue, 
which at his death in 1915 far surpassed that of 
any living American poet, is inexplicable to those 
persons only who forget the sentimental traditions 
of our American literature and its frank appeal to 
the emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. 
Riley's best "holt" as a poet was his memory of 



A NEW NATION 259 

his own boyhood and his perception that the child- 
mind lingers in every adult reader. Genius has 
often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence, 
and in this sense, surely, there was genius in the 
warm and gentle heart of this fortunate provincial 
who held that "old Indianapolis" was "high 
Heaven's sole and only under-study. " No one 
has ever had the audacity to say that of New 
York. 

We have had American drama for one hundred 
and fifty years, ^ but much of it, like our popular 
fiction and poetry, has been subliterary, more 
interesting to the student of social life and national 
character than to literary criticism in the narrow 
sense of that term. Few of our best known liter- 
ary men have written for the stage. The public 
has preferred melodrama to poetic tragedy, 
although perhaps the greatest successes have been 
scored by plays which are comedies of manners 
rather than melodrama, and character studies of 
various American types, built up around the 
known capabilities of a particular actor. The 
twentieth century has witnessed a marked activity 
in play- writing, in the technical study of the drama, 

' Representative American Plays, edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn, 
N. Y., 1917. 



1/ 



260 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

and in experiment with dramatic production, 
particularly with motion pictures and the out-of- 
doors pageant. At no time since The Prince of 
Parthia was first acted in Philadelphia in 1767 has 
such a large percentage of Americans been artisti- 
cally and commercially interested in the drama, but 
as to the literary results of the new movement it is 
too soon to speak. 

Nor is it possible to forecast the effect of a 
still more striking movement of contemporary 
taste, the revival of interest in poetry and the 
experimentation with new poetical forms. Such 
revival and experiment have often, in the past, 
been the preludes of great epochs of poetical 
production. Living Americans have certainly 
never seen such a widespread demand for con- 
temporary verse, such technical curiosity as to 
the possible forms of poetry, or such variety of 
bold innovation. Imagism itself is hardly as 
novel as its contemporary advocates appear to 
maintain, and free verse goes back far in our 
English speech and song. But the new genera- 
tion believes that it has made a discovery in 
reverting to sensations rather than thought, to 
the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular 
impressions, as if this were the end of the matter. 



A NEW NATION 261 

The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new 
poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case 
of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever 
happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite 
revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like 
North of Boston and A Spoon River Anthology, 
judgments of life that run very deep. 

American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, 
to be marking time and not to be getting notice- 
ably forward. Few names unknown ten years 
ago have won wide recognition in the domain of 
the novel. The short story has made little tech- 
nical advance since the first successes of "O. 
Henry," though the talent of many observers 
has dealt with new material offered by the racial 
characteristics of European immigrants and by 
new phases of commerce and industry. The 
enormous commercial demand of the five-cent 
weeklies for short stories of a few easily recog- 
nized patterns has resulted too often in a sub- 
stitution of stencil-plate generalized types instead 
of delicately and powerfully imagined individual 
characters. Short stories have been assembled, 
like Ford cars, with amazing mechanical expert- 
ness, but with little artistic advance in design. 
The same temporary arrest of progress has 



262 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

been noted in France and England, however, 
where different causes have been at work. No one 
can tell, in truth, what makes some plants in the 
literary garden wither at the same moment that 
others are outgrowing their borders. 

There is one plant in our own garden, however, 
whose flourishing state will be denied by nobody — 
namely, that kind of nature-writing identified with 
Thoreau and practised by Thomas Wentworth 
Higginson, Starr King, John Burroughs, John 
Muir, Clarence King, Bradford Torrey, Theodore 
Roosevelt, William J. Long, Thompson-Seton, 
Stewart Edward White, and many others. Their 
books represent, Professor Canby^ believes, the 
adventures of the American subconsciousness, 
the promptings of forgotten memories, a racial 
tradition of contact with the wilderness, and 
hence one of the most genuinely American traits 
of our literature. 

Other forms of essay writing, surely, have 
seemed in our own generation less distinctive of 
our peculiar quality. While admirable bio- 
graphical and critical studies appear from time to 
time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant 
discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. 

» " Back to Nature," by H. S. Canby, Yale Review, July, 1917. 



A NEW NATION 263 

Crothers, no one would claim that we approach 
France or even England in the field of criticism, 
literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and 
biography. We may have race-memories of a 
pine-tree which help us to write vigorously and 
poetically about it, but we write less vitally as 
soon as we enter the library door. A Frenchman 
does not, for he is better trained to perceive the 
continuity and integrity of race-consciousness, 
in the whole field of its manifestation. He does 
not feel, as many Americans do, that they are 
turning their back on life when they turn to books. 
Perhaps the truth is that although we are a 
reading people we are not yet a book-loving people. 
The American newspaper and magazine have been 
successful in making their readers fancy that 
newspaper and magazine are an equivalent for 
books. Popular orators and popular preachers 
confirm this impression, and colleges and univer- 
sities have often emphasized a vocational choice of 
books — in other words, books that are not books 
at all, but treatises. It is not, of course, that 
American journalism, whether of the daily or 
monthly sort, has consciously set itself to supplant 
the habit of book-reading. A thousand social and 
economic factors enter into such a problem. But 



264 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

few observers will question the assertion that the 
influence of the American magazine, ever since its 
great period of national literary service in the 
eighties and nineties, has been more marked in 
the field of conduct and of artistic taste than in 
the stimulation of a critical literary judgment. An 
American schoolhouse of today owes its improve- 
ment in appearance over the schoolhouse of fifty 
years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through 
the illustrated magazines, of better standards of 
artistic taste. But whether the judgment of 
school-teachers and school-children upon a piece 
of literature is any better than it was in the red 
schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a disputable 
question. 

But we must stop guessing, or we shall never 
have done. The fundamental problem of our 
literature, as this book has attempted to trace it, 
has been to obtain from a mixed population dwell- 
ing in sections as widely separated as the peoples 
of Northern and Southern Europe, an integral 
intellectual and spiritual activity which could 
express, in obedience to the laws of beauty and 
truth, the emotions stimulated by our national life. 
It has been assumed in the preceding chapters that 



A NEW NATION 265 

American literature is something different from 
English literature written in America. Canadian 
and Australian literatures have indigenous quali- 
ties of their own, but typically they belong to the 
colonial literature of Great Britain. This can 
scarcely be said of the writings of Franklin and 
Jefferson, and it certainly cannot be said of the 
writings of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thor- 
eau, Whitman, Lowell, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and 
Mr. Howells. In the pages of these men and of 
hundreds of others less distinguished, there is 
a revelation of a new national type. That the full 
energies of this nation have been back of our 
books, giving them a range and vitality and unity 
commensurate with the national existence, no 
one would claim. There are other spheres of 
effort in which American character has been more 
adequately expressed than in words. Neverthe- 
less the books are here, in spite of every defect in 
national discipline, every flaw in national char- 
acter; and they deserve the closest attention from 
all those who are trying to understand the Ameri- 
can mind. 

If the effort toward an expression of a peculiarly 
complex national experience has been the prob- 
lem of our literary past, the literary problem 



266 AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE 

of the future is the expression of the adjustment 
of American ideals to the standards of civilization. 
"Patriotism," said the martyred Edith Cavell 
just before her death, "is not enough." Nation- 
ality and the instincts of national separatism now 
seem essential to the preservation of the political 
units of the world-state, precisely as a healthy 
individualism must be the basis of all enduring so- 
cial fellowship. Yet it is clear that civilization 
is a larger, more ultimate term than nationality. 
Chauvinism is nowhere more repellent than in the 
things of the mind. It is difficult for some Ameri- 
cans to think internationally even in political af- 
fairs — to construe our national policy and duty in 
terms of obligation to civilization. Nevertheless the 
task must be faced, and we are slowly realizing it. 
In the field of literature, likewise, Americanism 
is not a final word either of blame or praise. It is 
a word of useful characterization. Only Ameri- 
can books, and not books written in English in 
America, can adequately represent our national 
contribution to the world's thinking and feeling. 
So argued Emerson and Whitman, long ago. But 
the younger of these two poets came to realize 
in his old age that the New World and the Old 
World are fundamentally one. The literature of 



A NEW NATION 267 

the New World will inevitably have an accent of 
•its own, but it must speak the mother-language of 
civilization, share in its culture, accept its discipline. 
It has been said disparagingly of Longfellow 
and his friends: "The houses of the Brahmins had 
only eastern windows. The souls of the whole 
school lived in the old lands of culture, and they 
visited these lands as often as they could, and, 
returning, brought back whole libraries of books 
which they eagerly translated." But even if 
Longfellow and his friends had been nothing more 
than translators and diffusers of European culture, 
their task would have been justified. They kept 
the ideals of civilization from perishing in this new 
soil. Through those eastern windows came in, and 
still comes in, the sunlight to illumine the Ameri- 
can spirit. To decry the literatures of the Ori- 
ent and of Greece and Rome as something now 
outgrown by America, is simply to close the 
eastern windows, to narrow our conception of civili- 
zation to merely national and contemporaneous 
terms. It is as provincial to attempt this restric- 
tion in hterature as it would be in world-poHtics. 
We must have all the windows open in our Ameri- 
can writing, free access to ideas, knowledge of 
universal standards, perception of universal law. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

An authoritative account of American Literature to 
the close of the Revolution is given in M. C. Tyler's 
History of American Literature during the Colonial 
Time, 2 volumes (1878) and Literary History oj the 
American Revolution, 2 volumes (1897). For a general 
survey see Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of 
America (1900), W. P. Trent, American Literature 
(1903), G. E. Woodberry, America in Literature 
(1903), W. C. Bronson, A Short History of American 
Literature (1903), with an excellent bibliography, W. B. 
Cairns, History of American Literature (1912), W. P. 
Trent and J. Erskine, Great American Writers (1912), 
and W. Riley, American Thought (1915). The most 
recent and authoritative account is to be found in The 
Cambridge History of American Literature, 3 volumes 
edited by Trent, Erskine, Sherman, and Van Doren. 

The best collection of American prose and verse 
is E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson's Li- 
brary of American Literature, 11 volumes (1888- 
1890). For verse alone, see E. C. Stedman, An 
American Anthology (1900), and W. C. Bronson, 
American Poems, 1625-1892 (1912). For criticism 
of leading authors, note W. C. Brownell, American 
Prose Masters (1909), and Stedman, Poets of America 
(1885). 

269 



270 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Chapters 1-3. Note W. Bradford, Journal (1898), 
J. Winthrop, Journal (1825, 1826), also Life and 
Letters by R. C. Winthrop, 2 volumes (1863), G. L. 
Walker, Thomas Hooker (1891), O. S. Straus, Roger 
Williams (1894), Cotton Mather, Diary ^ 2 volumes 
(1911, 1912), also his Life by Barrett Wendell (1891), 
Samuel Sewall, Diary ^ 3 volumes (1878). For Jona- 
than Edwards, see Works, 4 volumes (1852), his Life 
by A. V. G. Allen (1889), Selected Sermons edited by 
H. N. Gardiner (1904). The most recent edition of 
Franklin's Works is edited by A. H. Smyth, 10 volumes 
(1907). 

Chapter ^. Samuel Adams, Works, 4 volumes (1904), 
John Adams, Works, 10 volumes (1856), Thomas Paine, 
Life by M. D. Conway, 2 volumes (1892), Works 
edited by Conway, 4 volumes (1895), Philip Freneau, 
Poems, 3 volumes (Princeton edition, 1902), Thomas 
Jefferson, Works edited by P. L. Ford, 10 volumes 
(1892-1898), J. Woolman, Journal (edited by Whittier, 
1871, and also in Everyman's Library), The Federalist 
(edited by H. C. Lodge, 1888). 

Chapter 5. Washington Irving, Works, 40 volumes 
(1891-1897), also his Life and Letters by P. M. Irving, 4 
volumes (1862-1864). Fenimore Cooper, Works, 32 
volumes (1896), Life by T. R. Lounsbury (1883). 
Brockden Brown, Works, 6 volumes, (1887). W. C. 
Bryant, Poems, 2 volumes (1883), Prose, 2 volumes 
(1884), and his Life by John Bigelow (1890). 

Chapter 6. H. C. Goddard, Studies in New England 
Transcendentalism (1908). R. W. Emerson, Works, 12 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 271 

volumes (Centenary edition, 1903), Journal, 10 vol- 
umes (1909-1914), his Life by J. E. Cabot, 2 volumes 
(1887), by R. Garnett (1887), by G. E. Woodberry 
(1905); see also Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical 
study by O. W. Firkins (1915) . H. D. Thoreau, Works, 
20 volumes (Walden edition including Journals, 1906), 
Life by F. B. Sanborn (1917), also Thoreau, A Critical 
Study by Mark van Doren (1916). Note also Lindsay 
Swift, Brook Farm (1900), and The Dial, reprint by the 
Rowfant Club (1902). 

Chapter 7. Hawthorne, Works, 12 volumes (1882), 
Life by G. E. Woodberry (1902). Longfellow, 
Works, 11 volumes (1886), Life by Samuel Longfellow, 
3 volumes (1891). Whittier, Works, 7 volumes (1892), 
Life by S. T. Pickard, 2 volumes (1894). Holmes, 
Works, 13 volumes (1892), Life by J. T. Morse, Jr. 
(1896). Lowell, Works, 11 volumes (1890), Life by 
Ferris Greenslet (1905), Letters edited by C. E. Norton, 
2 volumes (1893). For the historians, note H. B. 
Adams, Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2 volumes 
(1893). M. A. DeW. Howe, Life and Letters of George 
Bancroft, 2 volumes (1908), G. S. Hillard, Life, Letters, 
and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 volumes (1876), 
George Ticknor, Life of Prescott (1863), also Rollo 
Ogden, Life of Prescott (1904), G. W. Curtis, Corre- 
spondence of J. L. Motley, 2 volumes (1889), Francis 
Parkman, Works, 12 volumes (1865-1898), Life by C. 
H. Farnham (1900), J. F. Jameson, History of Histori- 
cal Writing in America (1891). 

Chapter 8. Poe, Works, 10 volumes (Stedman- Wood- 
berry edition, 1894-1895), also 17 volumes (Virginia 



272 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

edition, J. A. Harrison, 1902), Life by G. E. Wood- 
berry, 2 volumes (1909). Whitman, Leaves of Grass 
and Complete Prose Works (Small, Maynard and Co.) 
(1897, 1898), also John Burroughs, A Study of Whit- 
man (1896). 

Chapter 9. C. Schurz, Life of Henry Clay, 2 volumes 
(1887). Daniel Webster, Works, 6 volumes (1851), 
Life by H. C. Lodge (1883). Rufus Choate, Works, 2 
volumes (1862). Wendell PhilUps, Speeches, Lectures, 
and Letters, 2 volumes (1892). W. L. Garrison, The 
Story of his Life Told hy his Children, 4 volumes (1885- 
1889). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Works, 17 volumes 
(1897), Life by C. E. Stowe (1889). Abraham Lincohi, 
Works, 2 volumes (edited by Nicolay and Hay, 1894). 

Chapter 10. For an excellent bibKography of the 
New National Period, see F. L. Pattee, A History of 
American Literature since 1870 (1916). 

For further bibliographical information the reader 
is referred to the articles on American authors in The 
Encyclopcedia Britannica and in The Warner Library 
(volume 30, The Student's Course, N. Y., 1917). 



INDEX 



Adams, C. F., 7 

Adams, John, opinion of Amer- 
ican independence, 11-12; as a 
■RTiter, 73 

Adams, Samuel, 73-74. 209 

After the Burial, Lowell, 172 

Agassiz, Fiftieth Birthday of, 
Longfellow, 156 

Age of Reason, Paine, 75 

Ages, The, Bryant, 104 

Alcott, Bronson, 118, 119, 139- 
140 

Aldrich, T. B., 256-57 

Alhambra, The, Ir\Tng, 91 

Allen, J. L., 247 

American Anthology, Stedman, 
256 

American characteristics, 3-5 

American colonies, literature in 
the 17th century, 25-42; 
journalism, 60-62; education, 
62-63; science, 63-64; bibli- 
ography of the literature, 269- 
270 

American colonists, predomi- 
nantly English, 12-25; motives 
for emigration, 16; moulded 
by pioneer life, 17-23; in 
1760, 59^60 

"American idea," 206-07 

American life since the Civil 
War, 234 et seq. 

American literature, the term, 6 

American Mercury, 61 

American Scholar, The, Emerson, 
123 

Ames, Fisher, 88 

1 8 273 



Among my Boohs, Lowell, 170 
Andrew Rykman's Prayer, Whit- 
tier, 161 
Annabel Lee, Poe, 192 
Anthologies, American, 269 
Arsenal at Springfield, The, Long- 
fellow, 156 
Assignation, The, Poe, 193 
Astoria, Irving, 91 
Atala, Chateaubriand, 96 
Atlantic Monthly, 161, 167, 170, 

250, 257 
Autobiography, Franklin, 58-59 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 
The, Holmes, 164, 167 

Bacchus, Emerson, 129 

Ballad of the French Fleet, A, 
Longfellow, 155 

Bancroft, George, 89, 176, 177-78 

Barefoot Boy, The, Whittier, 158 

Bartol, C. A., 115 

Battle Hymn of the Republic, 
Howe, 224, 225 

Battle of the Kegs, The, Hopkin- 
son, 69 

Bay Psalm Book, 35 

Beecher, H. W., 216-17 

Belfry of Bruges, The, Long- 
fellow, 156 

Bells, The, Poe, 5-6, 192 

Biglow Papers, The, Lowell, 170, 
172. 173 

Black Cat, The. Poe, 194 

Blaine, J. G., quoted, 163 

BlUhedale Romance, The, Haw- 
thorne, 145-46, 150-51 



274 



INDEX 



Boston News-Letter, 60 

Boy's Town, A, Howells, 250 

Bracebridge Hall, Irving, 91 

Bradford, William, 28 

Bradstreet, Anne, 36-37 

Bridge, The, Longfellow, 156 

Briggs, C. F., quoted, 190 

Brook Farm, 140, 143 

Brooklyn Eagle, The, 199 

Brown, Alice, 249, 250 

Brown University, 62 

Brownell, H. H., 225 

Brownson, Orestes, 141 

Bryant, W. C, one of the Knick- 
erbocker Group, 89; personal 
appearance, 101; life and, 
writings, 101-06; died (1878), 
255 

"Buffalo Bill." see Cody, W. F. 

Building of the Ship, The, Long- 
fellow, 155 

Burroughs, John, 262 

By Blue Ontario's Shore, Whit- 
man, 204 

Byrd, William, 44 

Cable, G. W., 246 

Calef, Robert. 43 

Calhoun, J. C, 215 

Calvinism in New England, 18- 

19 
Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 

Lowell, 174 
Captain Bonneville, Irving, 91 
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 139 
Cask of Amontillado, The, Poe, 

193 
Cavell, Edith, quoted, 266 
Cawein, Madison, 257 
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Cala- 
veras County, The, Clemens, 

237 
Century Magazine, 256 
Changeling, The, Lowell, 172 
Channing, Edward, 13 
Channing, W. E., 112. 113, 119, 

142 
ChMeaubriand, Vicomte de, 96- 

97 



Children's Hour, The, Longfel- 
low, 157 
Chita, Hearn. 248 
Chinese Ghosts, Hearn, 248 
Choate, Rufus, 215 
Church, Captain, 39 
Circuit Rider, The, Eggleston, 

247 
City in the Sea, The, Poe, 189 
Clark, Roger, 41 
Clarke, J. F., 141 
Clay, Henry, 208, 209-11 
Clemens, S. L. (Mark Twain), 

attacks Cooper's novels, 99; 

quoted, 236; life and writings, 

237-40; typically American, 

265 
Cobbler Keezar's Vision, Whittier, 

161 
Cody, W. F. (Buffalo Bill), 243 
Columbus, Life of, Irving, 91 
Commemoration Ode, Lowell, 170, 

172 
Common Sense, Paine, 75 
Conquest of Granada, Irving, 91 
Conquest of Mexico, Prescott, 179 
Conquest of Peru, Prescott, 179 
Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, 

Parkman, 184 
Cooke, Rose Terry, 249 
Cooper, J. F., 95-101, 265 
Cotton, John, 18, 32 
Courtship of Miles Standish, 

Longfellow, 155 
"Craddock, C. E.," see Murfree, 

Mary N. 
Cranch, C. P., 141 
Crisis, The, Paine, 75 
Cristus, Longfellow, 155-56 
Cromwell, Oliver, 10 
Crothers, S. M., 262-63 
Crowded Street, The, Bryant, 106 
Curtis, G. W.. 93, 141, 181 

Dana, C. A., 141 

Day is Done, The, Longfellow, 156 

Day of Doom, The, Wigglesworth, 

35-36 
Deerslayer, The, Cooper,. 99 



INDEX 



275 



Democratic Review, 199 

Dial, 136, 140 

Drake, J. R., 107 

Drama, American, in the 20th 

century, £59-60 
Dred, Stowe, 223 
Drum Taps, Whitman, 201 
Dwight, Timothy, 69 

Edict of the King of Prussia 
against England, Franklin, 58 
Edinburgh Review, The, 88 
Edwards, Jonathan, 32, 45, 48- 

52 
Eggleston, Edward, 247 
Eliot, John, 19, 38 
Elsie Venner, Holmes, 168 
Embargo, The, Bryant, 102 
Emerson, R. W., in 1826, 89; 
a Transcendentalist, 113-17; 
quoted, 116-17; life and writ- 
ings, 119-30; died (1882), 255; 
typically American, 265; ar- 
gues for American books, 266 
England in the 17th century, 13 
English Traits, Emerson, 128 
Essay on Man, Pope, 55 
Essays. Emerson, 125-26, 127, 

128 
Essays of the 20th century, 262- 

63 
Eternal Goodness, The, Whittier, 

161 
Ethan Brand, Hawthorne, 134 
Evangeline, Longfellow, 155 
Evening Revery, An, Bryant, 106 
Everett, Edward, Oration at 
Cambridge (1826), 86; quoted, 
87; lectures, 111-12; estimate 
of, 215; quoted, 230 
Excelsior, Longfellow, 5-6, 156 
Exiles' Departure, Whittier, 159 

Fable for Critics, Lowell, 170 
Fall of the House of Usher, The, 

Poe, 193 
Farewell Address, Washington, 

66 
Farewell Sermon, Edwards, 51 



Farmer Refuted, The, Hamilton, 
76 

Faust (translation), Taylor, 255 

Federalist, 65, 76, 77 

Ferdinand and Isabella, History 
of the Reign of, Prescott, 179 

Fiction of the 20th century, 261- 
262 

Fire of Driftwood, The, Longfel- 
low, 156 

First Snowfall, The, Lowell, 172 

Flood of Years, The, Bryant, 106 

Forest Hymn, A, Bryant, 106 

Franklin, Benjamin, born (1706), 
44; attitude toward church, 44; 
exponent of New England life, 
45; life and writings, 52-59; 
conducts Courant, 61; activity 
in Philadelphia, 61-62; letter 
from Washington to, 78-79; 
typically American, 265 

Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 249, 
250 

Freneau, Philip, 69, 70-72 

Frontenac, Parkman, 185 

Frost, Robert, 258 

Fugitive slave act, 144 

Fuller, Margaret, 119, 140-41 

Garrison, W. L., 89-90, 137, 159, 
208, 217-18 

Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, 230- 
231 

Gilded Age, The, Clemens, 237- 
238 

God Glorified in Man's Depend- 
ence, Edwards, 50 

Gold Bug, The, Poe, 193 

Gookin, Daniel, 38 

Greeley, Horace, 217-18 

Greenslet, Ferris, 169 

Hale, E. E., 224 

Half-Century of Conflict, A, Park- 
man, 185 
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 107 
Hamilton, Alexander, 76-77 
Hanging of the Crane, The, Long- 
fellow, 156 



276 



INDEX 



Harris, J. C, 246 

Harte, Bret, 240-42 

Harvard, John, 16 

Harvard College, 62 

Haunted Palace, The, Poe, 192 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in 1826, 
89; opinion of Bryant, 105; 
opinion of Transcendentalism, 
143; life and writings, 144-52; 
typically American, 265 

Hayne, Paul, 225 

Hazard of New Fortunes, A, 
Howells, 251 

Hearn, Lafcadio, 248 

Hecker, Father, 141 

Henry, Patrick, 72, 209 

Herons of Elmwood, The, Long- 
fellow, 156 

Hiawatha, Longfellow, 155 

Higginson, T. W., 142, 262 

Holmes, O. W., in 1826, 89; at- 
titude toward Transcendental- 
ism, 143; life and writings, 163- 
168; died (1894), 255 

Home Sweet Home, Payne, 107 

Hooker, Thomas. 21-22, 30-31 

Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, Eg- 
gleston, 247 

House of the Seven Gables, The, 
Hawthorne, 145, 150 

Hovey, Richard, 257 

Howells, W. D., 93, 234-35, 
250-51, 265 

Hubbard, William, 39 

Huckleberry Finn, Clemens, 238 

Humorists, American, 239 

Hutchinson, Anne, 32 

Hutchinson, Thomas, 12 

Hyperion, Longfellow, 152 

Indian Wars, Hubbard, 39 
Indians, in literature, 37-40; 

Thoreau's notes on, 136 
Innocents Abroad, Clemens, 237, 

239 
Irving, Washington, 89, 90-95 
Israfel, Poe, 189, 192 

Jackson, Andrew, 5 



Jackson, Helen Hunt, 248 
James, Henry, 250, 251-55 
Jay, John, 65 

Jefferson, Thomas, 79-85, 265 ' 
Jesuits in North America, The, 

Parkman, 185 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 249, 250 
John of Barneveld, Life and Death 

of. Motley, 181 
Johnson, Edward, Captain, 38 
Joshua Whitcomb, Thompson, 

248 
Journal, Emerson, 122, 125, 127, 

235 
Journal, Thoreau, 134, 135 
Journal, Woolman, 69 
Journal and Correspondence, 

Longfellow, 216 
Journalism, in the colonies, 60- 

62; in 20th century, 263-64 

Kemble, Fanny, 245-46 
Kennedy, J. P., 245 
King, Grace, 247 
King, Starr, 262 
King Philip's War, 39-40 
King's College (Columbia), 62 
Knickerbocker group of writers, 
89; works by, 270 

Languishing Commonwealth, 

Walley, 41 
Lanier, Sidney, 255-56 
La Salle, Parkman, 185 ' 
Last Leaf, The, Holmes, 166 
Last of the Mohicans, The, Cooper, 

89, 98, 99 
Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper, 

97-99 
Leaves of Or ass. Whitman, 197, 

200, 202-03 
Letters, Motley, 181 
Letters from an American Farmer, 

Crevecoeur, 60, 68 
Liberator, The, 137, 217,218 
Library of American Biography, 

176 
Life on the Mississippi, Clemens, 

237 



INDEX 



277 



Ligeia, Poe, 193 

Lincoln, Abraham, recognizes 
uncertainty in the nation, 2; 
would have approved Win- 
throp, 29; address at Cooper 
Union (1860), 104-05; quoted, 
155; as a writer of liberty, 208; 
character and writings, 226- 
233; typically American, 265 

Lionel Lincoln, Cooper, 98 

lAterati, Pope, 107 

Little Women, Alcott, 140 

London, Jack, 243-44 

London in 1724, 54-56 

Longfellow, H. W., in 1826, 89; 
attitude toward Transcendent- 
alism, 143; life and writings, 
152-57; died (1882), 255; dis- 
paragement of, 267 

Longstreet, A. B., 245 

Louisiana Purchase, 88 

Lowell, J. R., in 1826, 90; at- 
titude toward Transcendental- 
ism, 143; life and writings, 
168-74; died (1891), 255; typi- 
cally American, 265 

Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 
Harte, 241 

Lyceum system, 175 

McFingal, Trumbull, 69 
Magazines, in colonies, 60-61; 

in 20th century, 263-64 
Magnalia Christi Americana, 

Mather, 46, 47 
Maidenhood, Longfellow, 156 
Man Who Corrupted Uadleyhurg, 

The, Clemens, 238 
Man Without a Country, Hale, 224 
Marble Faun, The, Hawthorne, 

146, 151 
Marshes of Glynn, The, Lanier, 

255 
Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens, 87 
Mason, John, Captain, 38 
Massachusetts to Virginia, Whit- 
tier, 160 
Mather, Cotton, 43. 45-48; 

diary, 46-47 



Mather, Increase, 43 
Maud Muller, Whittier, 5-6 
Memorial Odes, Lowell, 172 
Miller, C. H. (Joaquin), 244 
Minister s Black Veil, The, Haw- 
thorne, 30 
Minister's Wooing, The, Stowe, 

223 
Modern Instance, A, Howells, 251 
Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman, 

185 
Moody, W. v., 257 
Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow, 

156 
Morris, G. P.. 107 
Mosses from an Old Manse, Haw- 
thorne, 145 
Motley, J. L., 143-44, 176, 180- 

182 
Muir, John, 244-45 
Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, 

Poe, 194 
Murfree, Mary N. (C. E. Crad- 

dock), 247 
My Garden Acquaintance, Lowell, 

174 
My Literary Friends and Ac- 
quaintances, Howells, 251 
My Literary Passions, Howells, 

250 
My Lost Youth, Longfellow, 156 
My Mark Twain, Howells, 251 
My Psalm, Whittier, 160 
My Study Windows, Lowell, 170 
Mysterious Stranger, The, Clem- 
*ens, 238 

National Gazette, 71 

National Literature, Channing, 
112 

National Ode, Taylor, 255 

Nature, Emerson, 123, 128, 131 

Nature-writing, 262 

Netherlands, History of the United, 
Motley, 181 

New England, a digression from 
English society, 14; at the 
beginning of 18th century, 43- 
44; characteristics of the peo- 



278 



INDEX 



New England — Continued 

pie of, 109-11; in last quar- 
ter of 19th century, 248 et seq. 
New England, History of, Win- 

throp. 28-29 
New England Courant, 61 
New National period in American 
literature, 234 et seq.; biblio- 
graphy, 272 
New York at beginning of 18th 

century, 44 
New York Tribune, 140, 218 
Newburyport Free Press, 90, 159 
Newspapers, in colonies, 60-61; 

in 20th century, 263-64 
North American Review, 88, 103, 

104, 112, 170 
North Carolina in 1724, 44 
North of Boston, Frost, 261 
Norwood, Colonel, 27 

Oake, Urian, 41 

Old Creole Days. Cable, 246 

Old Homestead, The, Thompson, 

248 
Old Ironsides, Holmes, 166 
Old Manse. 119-20, 145 
Old Regime, The, Parkman, 185 
Old Swimmin' Hole, The, Riley, 

247 
Oldtovm Fireside Stories, Stowe, 

223 
Oldlown Folks, Stowe, 223 
Olmsted, F. L., 246 
On a Certain Condescension in 

Foreigners, Lowell, 174 
Oratory in America, 208 et seq. 
Oregon Trail, The, Parkman, 

184 
Otis, James, 72, 73 
Our Hundred Days, Holmes, 168 
Outcast of Poker Flat, The, Harte, 

242 
Outre-mer, Longfellow, 152 
Overland Monthly, 240 

Page, T. N., 246, 247 
Paine, Thomas, 74-76 
Parker, Theodore, 115, 119, 141, 
206 



Parkman, Francis, 143-44, 17o, 

182-86 
Passage to India, Whitman, 204 
Passionate Pilgrim, A, James, 

253 
Pathfinder, The, Cooper, 99 
Pattee, F. L., 236 
Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow, 

155 
Paulding, J. K., 107 
Payne, J. H., 107 
Pennsylvania, University of, 62 
Pennsylvania Gazette, 62 
Pennsylvania Magazine, 74 
Pequot War (1637), 38-39 
Percy, George, 27, 38 
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 249 
Philip II, History of the Reign of, 

Prescott, 179 
Phillips, Wendell, 208, 215-16 
Picture of New York, Mitchill, 

90 
Pilot, The, Cooper, 98 
Pioneers, Pioneers, Whitman, 

204 
Pioneers, The, Cooper, 97-98, 99 
Pioneers of France, The, Park- 
man, 185 
Pirate, The, Scot, 98 
Plymouth Plantation, History of, 

Bradford, 28-29 
Poe, E. A., "literature of escape," 

8; in 1826, 89; in New York, 

108; life and writings, 187-96 
Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, 

Holmes, 168 
Poetry, Revolutionary verse, 69- 

72; of freedom, 223 et seq.;' 

of the 20th century, 260-61 
Poets and Poetry of America, 

Griswold, 107 
Poor Richard, Franklin, 20, 57 
Pory, John, 27 
Prairie, The, Cooper, 98, 99 
Precaution, Cooper, 97 
Prescott, W. H., 89, 143-44, 176, 

178-80 
Present Crisis, The, Lowell, 172 
Prince of Parthia, The, 260 



INDEX 



279 



Professor at the Breakfast Table, 

The, Holmes, 168 
Psalm of Life, The, Longfellow, 

156 
Psalm of the West, Lanier, 255 
Publick Occurrences, 60 
Puritans, The, 34-35 
Purloined Letter, The, Poe, 193 

Quarterly, The, 88 

Rainy Day, The, Longfellow, 156 

Ramona, Jackson, 248 

Ramoth Hill, Whittier, 138 

Raven. The, Poe, 192 

Read, T. B., 225 

Reality of Spiritual Life, The, 
Edwards, 50 

Reaper and the Flowers, The, 
Longfellow, 153 

Red Rover, The, Cooper, 98 

Religious freedom in the colonies, 
16^ 

Rene, Chateaubriand, 96 

Repplier, Agnes, 262 

Revolution, influence upon liter- 
ature, 66 et seq.; bibliography, 
270 

Rights of Man, The, Paine, 75 

Riley, J. W., 247, 257-59 

Ripley, George, 141 

Rise of Silas Lapham, The, How- 
ells, 251 

Rise of the Dutch Republic, Mot- 
ley, 180 

Rivulet, The, Bryant, 106 

Robinson, John, 11 

Roderick Hudson, James, 253 

Rolfe, John, 38 

Romanticism in American litera- 
ture, 187 et seq. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, 243 

Roughing It, Clemens, 10, 237 

Rowlandson, Mary, 39 

Rules for Reducing a Great Em- 
pire to a Small One, Franklin, 
58 

Russell, Irwin, 246 



Salem "witchcraft," 43 
Salmagundi Papers, Irving and 

Paulding, 91 
Sanborn, F. B., 142 
Sandys, George, 27 
Scarlet Letter, The, Hawthorne, 

7, 30, 145, 146, 148, 149-50 
School-Days, Whittier, 158 
Scott, Sir Walter, 95 
Scribner's Monthly, 256 
Scudder, Horace, 169 
Seaweed, Longfellow, 156 
Sewell, Samuel, Judge, 47-48 
Shepard, Thomas, 16, 31-32 
Short story, the, 261-62 
Sm. E. R., 257 
Simms, W. G., 245, 246 
Simple Cobbler of Agawam, The, 

Ward, 37 
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry 

God, Edwards, 50 
Skeleton in Armor, The, Longfel- 
low, 155 
Sketch Book, Irving, 89, 91 
Skipper Ireson's Ride, Whittier, 

161 
Slavery, influence on literature, 

207 et seq. 
Slavery in Massachusetts, Thor- 

eau, 137 
Smith, F. H., 247 
Smith, John, 8-10, 20,^38 
Smith, Sydney, quoted, 88-89 
Snow-Bound, Whittier, 158, 161- 

162 
Snorv-Image and Other Tales, 

The, Hawthorne, 145 
Songs of Labor, Whittier, 161 
South Carolina in 1724, 44 
South, The, in American litera- 
ture, 245 et seq. 
Sparks, Jared, 176 
SpofiFord, Harriet Prescott, 249 
Spoon River Anthology, Masters, 

261 
Spy, The, Cooper, 89, 97, 98 
Stamp Act (1765), 59 
Star-Spangled Banner, The, Key, 

107, 225 



280 



INDEX 



Stedman, E. C, 225, 256 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 219-23, 

249 
Strachey, William, 26, 38 
Summary View of the Rights of 

British America, A, Jefferson, 

80 
Sumner, Charles, 216 
Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line, 

Lowell, 174 

Tales of a Traveler, Irving, 91 
Tales of a Wayside Inn, Long- 
fellow, 155 
Tamerlane and Other Poems, Poe, 

89 
Taylor, Bayard, 255 
Telling the Bees, Whittier, 158 
Tennessee's Partner, Harte, 242 
Thanatopsis, Bryant, 103, 104, 

106 
Thomas, Edith, 257 
Thompson, Denman, 248 
Thoreau, H. D., representative 
of New England thought, 119; 
life and writings, 130-39; 
natiure-writing, 262; typically 
American, 265 
Ticknor, George, 89, 111, 178, 216 
Timrod, Henry, 225 
To Helen, Poe, 189, 192 
Tom Sawyer, Clemens, 238 
Tour of the Prairies, Irving, 91 
Transcendentalism, 111 et seq., 

218; bibliography, 270-71 
Tritemius, Whittier, 161 
True Relation, Smith, 8-10, 25-26 
True Repertory of the Wrack of 
Sir Thomas Gates, Kt. vpon 
and from the Islands of the 
Bermudas, Strachey, 26 
Tuckerman, F. G., quoted, 117 
Twain, Mark, see Clemens, S. L. 
Twicetold Tales, Hawthorne, 148 
Tyler, Professor, 64 

Ulalume, Poe, 192 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe, 98, 
208, 219, 220-23 



Union of the Colonies, Franklin, 

59 
Unitarianism, 112-13 

Verplanck, J. C, 107 

Very, Jones, 141 

Virginia, a continuation of Eng- 
lish society, 14; in 1724, 44 

Virginia House of Burgesses, 
Address of the, Jefferson, 80 

Virginians, The, Thackeray, 45 

Vision of Sir Launfal, The, Low- 
ell, 170, 172 

Walden, Thoreau, 131, 134* 135 

Walley, Thomas, 41 

Warner, C. D., 93 

Washington, George, 64-65, 66, 
77-78 

Waterfowl, To a, Bryant, 103, 
106 

Webster, Daniel, eulogy for 
Adams and Jefferson, 86-87; 
civic note in oratory of, 208; 
criticism of Clay, 210; his 
oratory, 211-15 

Week on the Concord and Merri- 
mac Rivers, A, Thoreau, 131 

Wendell, Barrett, 6 

West, The, in American litera- 
ture, 237 et seq. 

Westchester Farmer, The, Sea- 
bury, 76 

When Lilacs last in the Door- 
yard Bloomed, Whitman, 201 

When the Frost is on the Punkin, 
Riley, 248 

Whitaker, Alexander, 26-27, 38 

Whitman, Walt, in 1826, 90; in 
New York, 108; life and writ- 
ings, 196-205; died (1892), 255; 
typically American, 265; ar- 
gues for American books, 266 

Whittier, J. G., in 1826, 90; at- 
titude towards Transcendent- 
alism, 143; life and writings 
157-64; died (1892), 255 

William and Mary College, 62 

William Wilson, Poe, 194 



INDEX 



281 



Williams, Roger, 2, 16, 19, 32-34, 

38, 40-41 
Willis, N. P., 107 
Winthrop, John, 17, 18, 28-29 
Wirt, William. 245 
Wister, Owen, 243 
Wonder-Book, The, Hawthorne, 

145, 147 



Woodberry, George, 257 
Woodworth, Samuel, 107 
Woolman, John, 69 
Wreck of the Hesperus, 
Longfellow, 155 



The. 



Yale University, 62 

Years of my Youth, Howells, 250 



